Rug hooking and quilting have traditionally had their ups and downs, but lately they're up-high on the walls of homes and museums, and especially art galleries.

Quilt artist Laurie Swim watches the sun rise from her favourite window on the second floor of an old Cape Cod house in Blue Rocks, NS. Once it's light, she'll drive to her studio in a heritage building in Lunenburg. Three hundred kilometres away, on another shore, Deanne Fitzpatrick drives a short distance from an old clapboard farmhouse to her rug hooking studio in Amherst, NS. Separated by distance and discipline, the two artists are connected by a common thread: to push the boundaries of traditional craft.

Our ancestors have long been recycling remnants and scraps to make mats to warm their floors, and quilts to warm their beds. But the new generation rugs are made from heavily textured, hand-dyed wools, and cloth with bits of specialty fabric like linen and silk, and metallic threads. Similarly, contemporary quilts combine luxurious fibres like silk, satin and lace with machine embroidery and appliqué work.

Modern quilting and rug hooking borrow from such schools as impressionism, pointillism and realism, blurring the distinction between art and craft.

"Any medium lends itself to artistry," says Deanne Fitzpatrick. "Whether you're a blacksmith, a painter or a rug hooker, the art is in the approach. It's not what you do that makes something art; it's how you do it and why you do it."

Working from a vibrant palette of old wool and recycled cloth, Fitzpatrick captures a sculptural landscape of wonky houses and harbours inhabited by big-bottomed females in bathing attire, and kerchief-wearing women with dour demeanors. These colourful characters convey a range of emotions through the simple tilt of the head or tip of a hat.

A prolific hooker, Fitzpatrick's recent works include a piece called Blueberry, which captures the reds and golds of a Nova Scotia blueberry field in the fall, and CBC Towers on the Tantramar, an Impressionistic look at the iconic radio towers on the Tantramar Marsh. A piece called Fireflies resembles a traditional hooked rug, but at 60 by 36-inches it's twice the size, and there's a contemporary aspect to the quality of the fireflies dotting the night sky.

Although there were accomplished rug hookers in her family, Fitzpatrick didn't learn to hook until after she had left her home in Newfoundland, and was living in Nova Scotia. "I was in my mid-20s and needed something to warm the floors of an old farmhouse," she says. "So I attended a meeting of the Rug Hooking Guild of Nova Scotia. They taught me the basics-how to cut wool and pull up a loop. I knew it was for me as soon as I started."

In Fitzpatrick's hand the hook became a tool for self-expression, and what began as a practical craft has evolved into a form of pointillism that she has practised for the past 25 years. Her work has roots in the primitive textiles of other countries, but Fitzpatrick believes that the unique way of using a hook to loop strips of scrap cloth and worn out clothing onto old burlap feed bags is indigenous to North America.

"The exact origin is muddied," she says, "but it seems to have emerged along the eastern seaboard of North America in the early 1800s. There's evidence that it was already well established in the 1850s."

Fitzpatrick chronicles the evolution of hooked rugs in her book Hook Me A Story: The History and Method of Rug Hooking in Atlantic Canada. She says that interest in Atlantic Canada peaked in the first few decades of the 20th century. The early 1900s saw the development of the Cheticamp Hooked Rug Industry in Cape Breton. At the same time the Eaton's catalogue featured an assortment of commercial patterns made by John E. Garrett and Sons, of New Glasgow. Production of Grenfell mats (see "Labrador Luxury," below left) for American markets was in full swing in Northern Newfoundland and Labrador, and in Paradise, on the Avalon Peninsula, Deanne Fitzpatrick's paternal grandmother, Emma was making a name for herself by designing mat patterns on old burlap sacks with pieces of charred wood that she pulled from the fire.

"At any given time, she had 20 to 30 mats spread around," says Fitzpatrick. The best stayed safely rolled beneath a bed, emerging for special occasions, like the annual visit of the parish priest. The next best rugs had pride of place in low traffic areas, like the parlour and bedrooms, while hit and miss mats found their home in the kitchen, on the porch or at the foot of the stairs, where they were eventually joined by better rugs that had deteriorated with wear and tear and rigorous washing. In the steady migration of rugs throughout the house, the last stop was the back door.

Hooked rugs fell from fashion as commercial floor coverings became more widely available; women of Emma's generation sold their mats or traded them to peddlers for coveted squares of linoleum.

"Some people look on this as a tragedy," says Fitzpatrick. "I don't see it that way. I think it worked for those women. It gave them a sense of independence. Cash was a rare commodity in those days. No one forced them to part with their rugs. It was a choice."

Fitzpatrick's choice is to work full-time as a rug hooker; her rugs are in the permanent collections of The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, The Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador, The Nova Scotia Art Bank and The Canadian Museum of Civilization, yet she struggles to explain what she does. "It's best to say I'm a rug hooker," she says with a grin. "It's a huge disappointment for some people if I tell them that I'm an artist and then they discover that I only hook rugs."

Laurie Swim also contemplates how to define what she does. "We sit on a fence between art and craft," she says. A graduate of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Swim is one of the country's best-known practitioners in the art quilting medium; she has pieces in many private and public collections, including the Nova Scotia Art Bank, Nova Scotia Designer Craft Council, the City of Toronto Art Collection and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Despite having worked as a quilt artist for more than 35 years, Swim describes herself as a visual artist who works in the medium of fibre.

"My approach is 'painterly,'" she says. "Traditional quilters look at the fabric first; I start with an image and then select the fabrics I use as paints."

Mary Pratt, Atlantic Canada's illustrious realist painter, tackles the thorny issue of what constitutes art in the introduction she wrote for Swim's third book, Rags to Riches: The Quilt as Art. Having questioned whether Swim's fabric wall art is more akin to tapestries made in the Middle Ages or scrap quilts made by her thrifty ancestors, Pratt seems to equivocate.

For her part, Laurie Swim rejects the belief that quilts were ever purely utilitarian. "There were better ways to keep warm," she says. "Woven wool blankets were much easier to make."

Doris Eaton, renowned rug hooker and a founding member of the Rug Hooking Guild of Nova Scotia, shares Swim's opinion. Eaton can't imagine that her ancestors produced such lovely rugs from mere necessity.

"In those days, no one thought of women expressing themselves," says Eaton. "But I just can't think that my grandmother wasn't as happy with the rugs she produced as I am with mine. Certainly her rugs were useful, as were quilts, but that wasn't the whole story.

"Even those made for everyday use were assembled with a sense of composition and colour. In the attempt to use what was at hand there was always a need to be creative."

Laurie Swim's need for creativity has led her to initiate a number of large-scale community-made quilts. In 1995 she collaborated with volunteers in Kingston, Ont, to assemble thousands of thumbnail-size bits of fabric for a nine by 15-foot piece called Pulling Together, commemorating the work that went into building the Rideau Canal. A more recent project, and her largest to date, is a seven by 20-foot work called Breaking Ground to memorialize the Hogg's Hollow Disaster, a tragedy in 1960 where five Italian immigrants died while building a water main for the city of Toronto. Over the next few years Swim plans to organize a similar community effort to create a Halifax Explosion Memorial Quilt.

She is currently working on a series called Land, Sea and Memory slated for exhibition at the Mary E. Black Gallery in Halifax July 22 to September 5, and del Mano in Los Angeles later this year.

In a departure from past works, the new series features colourful borders as an interpretation of groundcover. Open House depicts the fishing shack Swim sees from the window of her house. "It's one of the most photographed buildings in the province," she says. "It looks so fragile but the cove protects it." In the Beginning aptly demonstrates Swim's artistry-wielding her sewing machine like a palette knife, she sculpted a realistic swath of sand from a piece of linen someone left at her door.

Mary Pratt credits contemporary quilters and rug hookers with employing the same understanding of line and colour as the Sicilian artists who created great mosaic masterpieces by piecing together bits of gold, gems and stones. However, she cautions that technical skill alone is not enough. Creativity must rise above considerations of workmanship, she says, providing a new form through which we can recognize some essential part of ourselves. It must give comfort and warmth.

For a world in need of reassurance, there are no better sources of comfort and warmth than handmade quilts and rugs.