Jerry J. Herrmann/The Daily Courier
Nancy Crisman of Prescott shows off her Best of Show arabesque octagon hooked rug in the Homemaking Department at the 2009 Yavapai County Fair.
A Prescott woman who began showing her rugs at the Yavapai County Fair seven years ago once again has the top hooked rugs at the fair.
Judges selected Nancy Crisman's 5 1/2-foot arabesque octagon 100 percent wool flannel hooked rug as the first-place and Best of Show for hooked rugs. Her smaller two-foot by three-foot hooked rug featuring red roses inside a leaf frame won the Judges Choice ribbon.
She also entered a small rug that shows a house flying an American flag next to a tree under the moon.
Crisman's rugs are on display in the Home-
making Arts Department at the 2009 Yavapai County Fair, which runs through 4 p.m. Sunday.
The native of Kingston, N.Y., said she initially started out sewing and quilting as a young girl.
"I was brought up in an old three-story stone house outside Woodstock (N.Y.) in Ulster County that was built in 1750. It had six fireplaces. The floors were cold so there were a lot of rugs scattered around. So it was natural to switch from quilting to hooking rugs," Crisman said.
Crisman estimates that over the past 25 years she has completed 50 hooked rugs of all sizes.
Her two prize-winning hooked rugs at this year's county fair are reproductions of some of the dozen or so old rugs her great-aunt made. The original backing wasn't as durable as today's, so the rugs have deteriorated.
She said she worked for about an hour a day for a year to complete her 5 1/2-foot arabesque octagon rug.
This is the second-largest hooked rug she has made. "I usually work for an hour or two in the morning because that is when the light is good. You need good light to hook rugs," Crisman said.
Two years ago, she made a much bigger hooked rug that also won the Best of Show in hooked rugs at the fair. Most of her rugs, Crisman said, are in the three-foot by five-foot range.
Crisman said she and her late husband, Virgil, moved to Prescott 22 years ago. "We looked for our ideal retirement place for eight years before we found it in Prescott. At that time we had Arabian horses and wanted a place we could have horses and ride them year round. We found that place in Prescott," she said.
Since her husband died 11 years ago, Crisman said she has shipped all their horses to their son, Mark Crisman, who is a professor of veterinary medicine at Virginia Tech University.
Their other son, Barry, is an artist in Phoenix.
Crisman said there aren't many rug-hookers in the quad-cities. She is a member of the Hassayampa Hookers, which meet at Sharlot Hall Museum the second Wednesday of each month. She urges anyone wanting to learn how to make hooked rugs to attend one of their meetings. "It's easy to get hooked," she quipped.
