Not your usual tourist ad: Mark Critch's scene of real-life N.L. turned into rug

Real life in Newfoundland and Labrador isn't quite as serene as some tourism ads might have you believe, and that's something Mark Critch knows all too well.

In his book, Son of a Critch, he described a day in May when he was standing on a five-foot snow bank and a Camaro blasting Great Big Sea sped past him, tossing a Tim Hortons cup out the window and flipping him off.

"But they don't make hooked mats out of that!" he wrote.

Well, one rug hooker has put Critch's foot in his mouth for him, and yes, turned that scene into a reality.

"It was a fun one to do. It's just like, all the time I was saying, this is so much fun, creating this picture," said Maureen Ashfield, who took up rug hooking two years ago after retiring in Robert's Arm.

"Although I didn't have a clue what a Camaro looked like."

Google helped her figure out what the back end of a Camaro looked like, but the hardest part, Ashfield said, was getting the middle finger out the window just right.

"It's been fun," she told CBC's Weekend AM.

Ashfield said it wasn't particularly difficult to create the mat; she took a piece of burlap and roughly sketched in the border and what she wanted the scene to look like.

She took up rug hooking as a hobby, but has since realized it's more than that.

"I went first probably just as a craft, something to do. But now what I'm seeing is thatit is so much a part of the life and culture of Newfoundland and the outport, and just the kind of world that people lived in and what they did," she said.

"At first it was just, sort of, I need something to do, and now it's, like, this is amazing what's here."

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