For exactly two years, Cheryl Orcutt’s life was consumed – by a rug.
She had thought about hooking this particular floor masterpiece for close to 20 years and when she finally finished her doctorate, the Peterborough resident and Francestown Elementary School special education teacher immersed herself in the project.
She’d wake up early before school and work on it for a couple hours and then would rush home and begin where she left off well into the night. The nine-and-a-half by 15 foot design was shared with her by Hallie Hall, her teacher and rug hooking mentor.
“It just kind of called my name,” Orcutt said.
But it wasn’t an easy project to begin. When Hall was moving to Oregon with her son, she cut up the pattern, created by well-known hooked rug designer Pearl McGowan, and gave pieces to many of her students. When it came time to make the rug, Orcutt got as many pieces as she could, but not all of them.
Eventually she was able to piece the pattern together and then embarked on her biggest project yet. She began the rug on June 1, 2015 and finished on June 1, 2017.
“Thousands upon thousands of hours,” Orcutt said. “It was a huge undertaking.”
With its intricate scrolls and colorful flowers, Allure was her biggest challenge yet and that was just the hooking part. The sheer size of the rug presented its own set of difficulties.
Orcutt has been hooking rugs since she lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia in her early 20s. She saw a beautiful piece on the front of Woman’s Day magazine and thought it would be a way to help decorate her condo.
“I thought ‘I could do that’” she said.
It’s been an on again, off again passion for her and one that led her to join the White Mountain Woolen Magic, New Hampshire’s Statewide Rughooking Guild. She currently has two pieces in the latest show at the League of NH Craftsmen gallery in Concord featuring the guild – one of a jaguar that she began in the early 1990s and completed during an artist residence at Kingsbrae International Residence for the Arts in July of 2017, where she was one of 15 artists chosen for a one month residency at the St Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada facility. The other is a table runner that she designed herself.
But while her rug hooking work is impressive, it’s just a hobby. Her career as a special education teacher is what gives her the greatest joy. She spent a decade at Peterborough Elementary School and the last eight years at Francestown Elementary. Her decision to get back into teaching came after a time when she raised, trained and showed Morgan horses.
And she quickly connected with a specific kind of student.
“The ones who had difficulties learning were the ones I was drawn to,” Orcutt said.
She went back to school for special education to learn how to best serve those students who needed the most help, especially in reading. She learned that not all students take the same path when learning to read.
“So I made it my business to become as best trained as possible,” she said.
She immersed herself in the Orton Gillingham method, an approach designed to help struggling readers by explicitly teaching the connections between letters and sounds. It was that work that led to Orcutt founding the Windy Row Learning Center in Peterborough, where students get 50 hours of supervised tutoring over the course of a school year to give them the necessary help to get on track.
“It’s the gold standard for kids with dyslexia,” Orcutt said of the method.
And Orcutt has seen her fair share of success stories. There was a 16-year-old girl who could read less than a handful of words and within two years was reading at the same level of her peers.
She doesn’t see too many students of her own as the director, but had one this past school year and is in constant communication with the tutors to provide any help that is needed.
When she went to New England College for her doctorate, Orcutt wanted to see how special education teachers worked in the public school setting and wrote her dissertation on how others provided services to reading disabled students.
“It was interesting research,” Orcutt said.
Sure the success stories are nice, but it’s the journey that Orcutt enjoys the most. Seeing those little breakthroughs along the way are what make it all worthwhile.
In her life, Orcutt has worked in the hotel industry and owned the Fry Shop in Peterborough with her first husband, specializing in fried seafood and chicken.
“I still meet people around town that say ‘I wish you were still there,’” Orcutt said.
She’s had a love of horses from an early age, owning her first at the age of 12 and raised Morgan horses for many years.
“They call them the horse that America made,” Orcutt said.
At one point she thought of expanding the barn on her property to take the next step with horses, but decided against it to get back into teaching.
“That was a good decision,” she said.
The house she lives in was purchased by her parents around the time she was born and was originally a summer home. She’s lived there for the last 40 years and has seen no reason to leave.
“Society is much more mobile than it used to be, but me, not so much. I like where I am,” Orcutt said.
During her time off from school, she likes to garden and rug hook. Those are two ways for her to relax and allow her creativity to shine through.
“In rug hooking, there’s all kind of styles,” she said. “Really, the sky’s the limit because the final product is the interpretation of the hooker. You can do anything you want with a design.”
She’s drawn to bright colors, which is easy to see in her plantings and rugs. She has a studio in her house where she spends hours making her rugs and a dyeing station in the basement where she creates colored wool for her rugs and wall hangings. Orcutt is currently working on a rug of a flower from her garden, which she also painted to use for her inspiration.
“For me, it’s intensive, but very relaxing,” Orcutt said.
Orcutt is more well-known for her rugs, having been featured in magazines and books, but it’s her work with students that matters the most.
Sure she’s thought about retiring, but she enjoys what she does and that’s all that really matters.
“I’ve never had to work a job I didn’t like,” she said.