THERE'S a story, possibly apocryphal, that makers of traditional rag rugs like to tell. It's about the First World War soldier who, on returning home from the trenches, found all his clothes had disappeared. Where have they all gone? he asked his wife. She gestured to the rug on the floor. We didn't know whether you were going to be coming back, she said.

Like with so many other traditional craft-forms, what was once an essential part of everyday life has, in our age of greater creature comforts, become mainly a hobby and craft.

Not so long ago whole families across the north would have spent many an hour in the evening hooking away to make rugs for the floor and even covers for the beds.

"It started as a way to make coverings for floors like this!" says Louisa Creed, stamping on the stone-flagged floor of the Manor House at the Ryedale Folk Museum in Hutton-le-Hole. "It was a thrift measure. People wanted to make their homes snug, and wanted to be able to use up their old clothes."

It's easy to forget that luxuries such as fitted carpets and central heating are comparatively recent. Think of spending the winter in stone-floored cottage up in the Dales, with only an open fire for warmth, and you can soon see why rug-making became such a central part of rural life.

Rag rugs are the simplest form of coverings imaginable. Old clothing is cut up into strips, and the pieces threaded through a piece of old hessian 'backing' to make a thick, warm, durable rug.

Or bedcovers. According to Jenny Barnes, Heritage Lottery-funded access officer at the Folk Museum, 'new' rugs would often have taken pride of place on the bed in their first winter, before moving to the hearth, then the kitchen, and ultimately to the dog.

Social climbers may have sniffed at them as 'dust traps' but there was no doubting they were warm, inexpensive and hard-wearing.

"Even us soft southerners had rag rugs," she says. "We weren't allowed to admit it, because they were considered to be a sign of poverty, but we needed them to cover the flagstones!"

Sitting round the fire of a winter's evening 'hooking' rag rugs may have been an essential part of rural family life in days gone by, but that doesn't necessarily mean everyone enjoyed it. It was probably a chance for the adults to have a good chin-wag, but children may have felt they had something better to be doing.

Betty Whenray, who like Louisa Creed, is a leading light in Ebor Ruggers, a group of enthusiasts who meet regularly to share their love of rag-rugging, admits that even today she is approached by elderly people whose faces wrinkle with distaste at the thought. "It was compulsory for them as children. They had to do it before they could go out to play," she says. "They still come up to us and say they hate it!"

Taken as a hobby or a form of art, however, members of the Ebor Ruggers insist it is great fun.

There are two main ways of making rag rugs. 'Hookies', explains Louisa, were where strips of old cloth were pulled through a piece of hessian with a metal hook, to produce a tightly-woven effect. 'Clippies', on the other hand, were where shorter strips of old cloth were pushed through the back of the hessian cloth twice to form a 'U', leaving the cut ends to stand up and create a deep 'pile' effect. This, according to Dorothy Humpleby, an 80-year-old from Sheriff Hutton who says rag rug making has been going on in her home "as long as I can remember", is the more 'traditional' way.

You may get a few arguments about that. But whichever form of rag rug making you prefer, the range of designs is almost unlimited. In the old days, when the material used for clothes was comparatively dull, rag rugs tended to be drab affairs. Not any more.

Louisa Creed and her husband Lewis - "he sat and watched me do it for about 11 years, then took it up himself", says Louisa affectionately - have made wonderful rugs in animal designs and even one showing the pair of them at work on a rag rug. Dorothy Humpleby, meanwhile, has a beautiful rug in a stained glass window design that seems almost to glow with light and colour.

Ideas for designs can come from anywhere, Lewis and Louisa say - photographs, scenery, stamps, even doodles. Once you've got the idea, its simply a matter of sketching the outline with a felt pen on your piece of hessian, and you're away.

"We're the two hookers of Norfolk Street!" says Lewis cheerfully. "We sit down and start hooking away. We just love it!"

Updated: 11:20 Saturday, March 23, 2002