About Us

We three sisters hook because we love the traditional nature of the craft and the stories of the women who recycled clothes to hook rugs that kept their cold floors warm.  Our Pastimes PEI hooked pieces are handmade of the finest rug hooking materials of timeless designs; they are one-of-a-kind due to the nature of natural materials and the small number of pieces that we can hook. We name each piece and love to see each one go to a good home.

 It is our mission to provide rug hookers with high quality patterns and rug hooking wool and advice so that they, too, can explore their own creative talents.

You are more likely to hear us caution you not to buy something you don’t really need than encouragement to buy something for the sake of our sales for the day.

Today, Pastimes PEI is the small, traditional rug hooking and wool shop of three sisters – we grew up just down the road in Vernon on the Tweedy family farm; we have been designing and selling our rugs, small hooked pieces and patterns for about ten years now; we started small and have gradually expanded from a few of our own patterns and hooked pieces to a large selection of hooked pieces; lots of our own Pastimes PEI patterns in all sizes, basic kits, ready-to-hook wool fabrics, hand-dyed fabric, local wool yarns, and our exclusive art cards made from pictures of hooked pieces. We create everything that we sell here in the shop, from the patterns to the art cards.

Every time we design and print a new pattern, we hope it will bring some rug hooker the great joy that rug hooking gives us.

In the beginning we did not plan to open a shop but as experienced extension agents and teachers at our real workplace, we were asked to talk to groups of people in Women’s Institutes, church, 4-H and others about our rugs and hooking. We had begun hooking in the 1980s and as we learned to pull loops through backing to make rugs we kept hearing stories about old mats and their creators from the past. After researching for an university arts paper and taking photographs, we began to truly appreciate the work that people long ago put into their mats. therefore, we create each and every rug in the traditional styles and patterns of our ancestors here on Prince Edward Island.