The Craftsman’s Review

British craft, country living, and the people behind both — since 2019

She's been making them by hand for 65 years. Now her last collection is going out of the door.

Rosalind Thirlwell (73), a retired schoolteacher and rug maker from Corbridge, Northumberland, is closing her workshop this autumn. Her final handmade Seven Cats rug — the large half-moon design she's been making for years — is leaving her workshop one last time.

Corbridge, Northumberland. The kind of autumn morning where the kettle's on before seven and the cats are sitting in the same square of low sun they sat in last October — and the October before that. Rosalind Thirlwell leans over her worktable in the old stone outbuilding behind the cottage she and her husband Geoffrey bought in 1978. Skeins of wool in saffron, plum, charcoal, and burnt orange line the wooden shelves behind her. A tabby cat named Bramble is curled into a patch of light by the window, half asleep.

This autumn is different. It's her last in the workshop.

"I'm seventy-three," she says, not looking up from the wool in her lap. "I can still do the work. I just can't do it for as long anymore. My hands give out after about four hours now. They didn't used to."

She glances at the small flock of half-finished rugs on the shelf opposite her — each one with seven cartoon cats arranged across a soft, half-moon shape, the way she's been making them for years.

"This is the last batch. After November, the workshop closes for good."

65 years and three generations of wool

Rosalind doesn't call herself an artist. She's a teacher, she'll tell you — thirty-six years at the village primary school, retired in 2016. The rug making is something else. Something older.

Her grandmother Annie was a miner's wife in Easington Colliery, County Durham. In the pit villages of the North East, nothing was ever thrown away. Worn-out coats were cut into strips. Hessian came from old flour and sugar sacks. On long winter evenings, whole families sat round a wooden frame and worked those strips into thick, warm mats for the cold stone floors — "proggy mats", they called them. Annie learned it from her own mother. The tool she used, she kept for life: a progger her father had carved from a broken chair leg.

"My grandmother taught me the summer I turned eight. 1961. She sat me down at her kitchen table, put the strips of an old coat in my hand, and said, 'Waste not, pet. There's a mat in every old coat. And you finish what you start, even if it takes you all summer.' It took me all summer. The mat was awful. She put it down by her back door anyway."

For the next sixty-five years, Rosalind made rugs in the evenings and at weekends. Through teacher training college. Through raising her daughter Helen and her son Andrew. Through Geoffrey — her husband of forty years — and through losing him after a short illness in 2016.

"After Geoffrey died, I just kept working. The wool didn't ask me any questions. That helped."

By her own count, Rosalind has made a little over 3,800 rugs in sixty-five years. Some years it was barely a dozen. Some years, when the house was quiet and she had the time, it was closer to a hundred. The progger she still reaches for every morning is the same one her great-grandfather carved from that broken chair leg — passed down to Rosalind in the summer of 1961, the summer she first sat at the kitchen table and learned.

"It outlasted my grandmother. It'll probably outlast me," Rosalind says, running her thumb along the worn wooden handle. "That's how you know it was made properly."

My grandmother used to say wool remembers everyone who's touched it. I don't know if that's true. But I've never once made a rug that didn't feel like it belonged to somebody before it left this room. — Rosalind Thirlwell, Corbridge, Northumberland

What makes Rosalind's rugs different

What sets these apart isn't the cats — charming as they are. It's how they're made: as a piece of real, traditional handcraft, the way her grandmother taught her.

Each rug is made from heavy-pile wool yarn worked by hand into a cotton-backed canvas, then finished on the underside with a bonded non-slip backing that keeps the rug in place on wooden floorboards, tiles, or laminate. The seven cats on the front aren't printed — they're worked into the rug fibre by fibre, with their colours, whiskers, and expressions made from the wool itself. They won't peel, crack, or wash off, because there's nothing on the surface to come off.

That difference matters more than it sounds.

If you've shopped for a cat rug online in the last year, you've almost certainly seen photos that look very much like Rosalind's — a half-moon shape, seven cartoon cats across the front, the same general arrangement. Many of those rugs are printed. The image is heat-pressed onto a thin synthetic mat, and what arrives at your door is essentially a piece of fabric with a picture on it. The cats are an image, not a texture. Run your hand across one and you feel nothing.

Rosalind's rugs are the opposite of that. The whiskers stand up. The plum-coloured cat is actually plum-coloured wool. The black cat is actually black wool. You can feel each of the seven cats under your bare feet on a cold morning, and you can see the depth of them from across the room.

"I've had customers send me photos of the printed version they bought before they found me," Rosalind says, shaking her head a little. "Sad little things. Flat. Slippery. That's not handcraft — that's a photograph someone's glued onto a doormat and called a rug."

The rugs are made for the places she pictures them: a hallway, a cosy corner of the kitchen, the bit of floor just inside the front door. Low-pile enough not to catch on the hoover, dense enough not to flatten after a winter of wellies. The cotton-poly underside is machine washable on a cool, gentle wash when accidents happen — and they will. Cats are cats.

"It's a working rug, not a museum piece. Cats walk on it. Wellies walk on it. That's the whole point."

"I keep all of them. That's the part of this that matters."

Rosalind lifts a battered old biscuit tin down from a low shelf and sets it on the table. The lid still smells faintly of shortbread.

"These are letters from customers. I started getting them in 2021, when Helen — my daughter — first set up a little shop for me online. My granddaughter Lily has been running it since she turned fourteen. People still write proper letters every now and then. I keep every one of them."

She slides one out, dated April 2024:

Dear Mrs Thirlwell — I lost my cat Mabel of seventeen years in February. I ordered your rug because the seven little cats on it looked like every cat I'd ever loved, all together at once. It sits in front of my bed now. My new cat, Toast, sleeps on it every single night. I think she knows. Thank you for making something that holds that much. — Customer letter, Shrewsbury

Rosalind reads it through and folds it carefully back into the tin.

"That's why I'm still doing this at seventy-three. Letters like that one."

What sets the Seven Cats rug apart

• 100% handmadeOne rug at a time, by Rosalind, in her Northumberland workshop — no factory, no production line, no second pair of hands.
• Real wool pile — not a printThe seven cats are made from the wool itself, fibre by fibre. They can't peel, crack, or wash off the way printed designs do.
• Non-slip backingA bonded cotton-poly underside keeps the rug in place on floorboards, tiles, or laminate. No slipping. No bunching at the door.
• Made for everyday lifeDense low-pile construction, machine washable on a cool, gentle wash. Made to live in your hallway — not on a wall.
• Generously sizedMeasures 90 cm wide × 60 cm deep — wide enough for a front hallway, in front of the kitchen sink, or on the hearth in front of the fire. Not a small doormat.
• Final collectionRoughly 400 rugs remain from Rosalind's last run before she closes the workshop at the end of November 2026.

The end of an era — Rosalind's final collection

At the end of November 2026, Rosalind closes the workshop for good. Her daughter Helen — a midwife in York, nearly two hours south — has been asking her to move down for almost two years.

"The cottage is too big for one person and two cats," Rosalind says, with a small shrug. "Helen's right. It's time."

There's another reason, too — one she doesn't mention as readily.

"I don't have anyone to pass this on to. Helen's a midwife. Andrew works offshore, out of Aberdeen. None of the grandchildren want to spend ten years learning to do this the way my grandmother taught me. I don't blame them — it's not the world I learned this for. But it does mean that when I close the workshop, that's the end of it."

On the shelves of the workshop sit roughly 400 finished Seven Cats rugs — the result of a year spent finishing every piece she'd cut and started. Her final run. The last collection that will ever come out of the Thirlwell workshop.

A lot of them, she expects, will go out as gifts — daughters buying for their mums, husbands buying for their wives, friends buying for the cat lover they always struggle to buy for. If you ask, Rosalind includes a folded card with the story of the rug, written by hand.

"Lily — my granddaughter, she's sixteen — is helping me get the last of them out. She knows the internet far better than I ever will. I make the rugs. She handles the rest." Rosalind laughs, quietly. "It's the best division of labour we've ever had in this family."

To make sure they go to people who'll actually use them, she's set the final-collection price well below what she's charged at craft fairs for years.

"I'm not in this for the money anymore," she says. "I want them out there — in somebody's hallway, in front of the fire, by the back door. That's where they were made to be."

She nods towards Bramble, who has wandered over and is sitting squarely on the half-finished rug on the table — exactly the way she always does.

"And maybe with a cat sitting on them. That's how you know you've got one of mine."

What customers are saying

The short version

This is the rug you'll move from room to room, just so you can keep looking at it.

Each Seven Cats rug is made entirely by hand by Rosalind Thirlwell in her Northumberland workshop — one rug at a time, the way her grandmother taught her, the way her grandmother's mother taught her in a Durham pit village a hundred years ago. Cotton-backed, wool-piled, non-slip underneath, machine washable on a cool wash. Made to live in your hallway, your kitchen, or in front of the fire — not on a wall.

And every time you walk past it and one of your cats has commandeered it (and they will), you'll get that little "of course she has" moment, all over again.

Thank you, Rosalind. 🧶

Claim your rug now — with Rosalind's personal 100% money-back guarantee

Rosalind says it herself:

These rugs should only go home with people who'll actually love living with them. — Rosalind Thirlwell

That's why every rug comes with a 100% money-back guarantee:

Take the rug home. Put it by your door. Put it in front of the kitchen sink. Let your cat sit on it. If you don't love it, send it back within 30 days and get your money back. No questions asked.