CHETICAMP, Nova Scotia - Marie-Therese Aucoin, 72, sits in her kitchen at a wooden rug frame, her fingers nimble as she loops bits of wool through rough burlap at a 59-loops-per-minute pace.

She says she has hooked wool almost every day since she learned the craft from her mother more than a half-century ago.

"My mother taught it to me and all my sisters. In those days, all the women made hooked rugs. It was a part of our life," says Aucoin, who grew up as one of 10 children in the tiny fishing village of Cheticamp, on the rocky coast of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.