Web site of the month: Sara Hotchkiss '74

The new Web site designed for weaver Sara Hotchkiss '74 perfectly reflects her life as an artisan?a blend of colors, textures, words, and business acumen arranged to showcase the hand-woven rugs she makes and sells from her own Maine showroom, through galleries in Nantucket and Santa Fe, and online.

Brushing Cat

Her fort is colorful original-design rag rugs, woven in sizes ranging from wall hangings and stair runners to seamless carpets 12 feet wide. Hotchkiss's designs, she explains, "combine the lively color fields of rag rugs with the geometric possibilities of tapestry," and like her Web site, her rugs come in all the colors of an old-fashioned garden.

An art major who studied at Skidmore under the legendary textile artist Eunice Pardon, Hotchkiss set up her first weaving studio in 1974 and financed it with part-time jobs until 1985, "when I began supporting myself totally with my weaving and have been doing so since."

"Even as a 5-year-old, I loved fabrics," she writes in her site's bio section. "I loved the feel, the colors, I loved combining different swatches to make patterns." Her mother taught her knitting, which the little girl saw as pure magic: "sweaters, scarves, hats, all from a thin strand of yarn." A gardening grandmother "taught me to recognize the integral link between color, shape and texture ... crepe-paper orbs of pink poppies, ruffled spears of blue delphinium, a spiky carpet of lavender." Studying art at Skidmore clinched her fate: "My passion for fabrics, design and color, coalesced on the looms in Eunice Pardon's studio. That was in 1971. I've been a weaver ever since."

Her sunny studio, located on the site of an old farm in coastal Waldoboro, Maine, is outfitted with a 10- and a 12-foot Swedish loom, several smaller looms, and a pair of playful cats. (Cat lovers may especially appreciate Hotchkiss's 6- by 8-foot rug, "Brushing the Cat," whose model was her cat, Nutty. "She loves to be brushed," explains Hotchkiss. "She preens and squirms, breathes fire and becomes big, like a dragon. That's how the rug got its name.")

"I spend my days weaving, designing and sneaking out to the garden when time allows. My studio is cluttered with fabrics: solids, prints, snippets of different colors and textures that remind me of my grandmother's flowers."

To reach audiences beyond garden and studio, "one has to have a Web site nowadays," says Hotchkiss, who chose Erin Flett of E Flett Design to do hers. Flett's work had "a sensibility about it, with color, design, layout, and copy that spoke so clearly I knew this designer was very intuitive." Playful, too?hold your mouse down on the word "next" as you look at the images in the site's "Portfolio" section, and the gorgeous rugs whiz by as if you were spinning around in her showroom. Check it out here.