Silk Stocking Mats: Hooked Mats of the Grenfell Mission

Beginning in 1928, the Grenfell Mission sent out a call to socialites: When your stockings run, let them run to Labrador! The creative recycling of tattered stockings, dyed in soft hues, is just one of many innovations that made Grenfell hooked mats highly collectible folk art. In Silk Stocking Mats, Paula Laverty chronicles the development of a local craft into an art form.

For generations Newfoundland women had augmented their family's unreliable fishing income with a matting season in Feb...