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YELLOW SPRINGS — Sisters Georgia Kay Glass and Toby Ann Baker didn't write the book on Virginia Hamilton. But they did hook the rug.

And a year after it was finished for a celebration of the renowned author's life, the 4½-by-7-foot work is showing some potential for spreading the word about the late author's works.

The rug, which took 300 hours to research, 700 to plan and dye and 2,400 hours to hook, took a first place ribbon at the annual Pearl H. McGown Rug HookCrafters gathering Oct. 27-29 in DesMoines, Iowa. Among the 700 rugs on display only 15 earned that distinction.

The show also put the sisters in contact with the editor of Rug Hooking magazine, which is planning a feature story on it, and with the organizers of Celebrations, which publishes photos on the 70 best rugs of the year.

Whether it will make the final cut of Celebrations is not yet clear. But the sisters and their friends are celebrating the attention being focused on their project and the author it honors.

It was a project neither Georgia nor Toby ever imagined doing.

Visit to Kennebunkport

In 1992, Mrs. Glass was in the 24th year of a 25-year career as a secretary at Springfield-Clark Joint Vocational School when she persuaded her husband to go east on a vacation. "I'd always wanted to go to the New England states," she explained.

The Glasses ended up in Kennebunkport, Maine, and ventured into the studio of Joan Moshimer, a rug and fabric artist. The owner was there.

"She had me sit down at the frame," Glass recalls. "So I pulled a few loops, and I was hooked. I decided that's what I would like to do when I retired."

Her office friends then came up with the perfect retirement gift: a free trip to a rug-making camp at Montreat, N.C.

Glass now has been to roughly 20 camps.

When asked about her involvement in rug making, Toby Baker points toward her sister and says: "It's all her fault."

"I had never had an interest" in hooking, Toby said. Then Georgia brought along a project to a Fourth of July campout at Toby's home and asked her to try it.

"I drew a pumpkin and hooked a pumpkin," Toby recalled. She, too, was hooked.

"I was a school bus driver for 23 years," Toby said. When she lost sight in one eye, "they didn't want a one-eyed bus driver, so I retired."

Combining talents

As part of Geogia's pursuit of her passion in retirement, "I was in a weaving study group with Julia Cady here in Yellow Springs," she said.

One night after the group met, Cady said she'd like her to consider something.

Cady was a member of a committee considering how to honor Hamilton, who died of breast cancer in 2002.

The first suggestion was for a woven rug. Georgia suggested a hooked rug instead, largely for its storytelling and documentary potential.

But she needed help.

"I knew for myself I could not do this project alone," she explained. "I really don't have the art background. But I thought if I could bring Toby with me, maybe I'd try this."

Thus began Georgia and Toby's big adventure.

Awestruck at the author

Knowing only that Hamilton was a children's author, the sisters, who grew up and still live in the Lawrenceville area, had thoughts of bunny rabbits and other fluffy things.

Then they took a stack of Hamilton's books home with them from the Yellow Springs library.

"We were awestruck," Georgia said.

Hamilton not only won the Edgar Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Newberry Medal and the international Hans Christian Andersen Medal, she wrote everything from biographies to fiction to collections of African American folklore in what was a groundbreaking career.

"Each of her books could be a rug," Georgia said. "And it was just an awesome task to try to incorporate everything they wanted."

As the sisters did more research, their task seemed to grow.

A trip to Rankin House on the Ohio River put them on the route Hamilton's grandfather Levi Perry took to freedom on the Underground Railroad. They also visited his Jamestown home and the Yellow Springs area home that was the setting for Hamilton's youth and her Underground Railroad Mystery, "The House of Dies Drear."

They also took in parts of the author's life, learning about her years in New York with husband Arnold Adoff and the couple's love of Yellow Springs, where they raised children Jaime and Leigh.

"We drove miles, we did everything," Georgia said. They even found out Hamilton collected figurines of frogs.

It was almost too much.

"The day before we came to show them a sketch of it, I was still trying to figure out what to do," Toby said.

For her part, "I was a wreck," Georgia said.

But the plan was approved, the logistics and calculations for dyeing began, as did the 2,400 hours of hooking work.

About the raccoons

The rug, whose home is a meeting room at the Yellow Springs Community Library, is made of 100 percent wool fabric that has been washed and dried.

"I can use textures to obtain some of the things I want," Georgia said.

"The color planning is a big part of it," she added, and that eventually leads to wool being stuffed into various canning jars for various amounts of time for the desired effect.

"We thought we hooked enough alike that it looked like the same person," Toby said.

One thing they hadn't planned for was a break-in by raccoons.

While Georgia and her husband were in Florida for a winter break, "three raccoons got into my house and did $12,000 worth of damage," she said.

The rug was saved only because Toby thought she might do a little work on it while her sister was away.

That meant it was done in time for the Oct. 29, 2005, celebration of Hamilton's life at the Yellow Springs Community Library.

A nervous and ultimately rewarding moment for the sisters was when Hamilton's husband stood before it.

Although he'd approved the sketch "he never saw it (afterward) until it was complete," Toby said.

"He just came and stood before it for a while, a long time. And then he said 'Wow.' "

The sisters took it as a good Wow.

And when Hamilton and Adoff's daughter, Leigh, told her her mother would have loved it, "that meant everything to us, really," Toby said. "I think our greatest regret was we never had the opportunity to meet Virginia," she added. "By the time we got done with the project, we felt like we knew her heart and soul."

Spreading the word

It was when the rug made a trip to Sauder Village in Archbold in August that it began to show the potential for spreading the word about Hamilton to a wider audience.

"We were overwhelmed by the response," Toby said. Those who saw it "wanted to read the books and know more about her," she said.

"You could always tell the teachers," Georgia added. "They knew about her."

It was at Sauder Village that they were encouraged to take the rug to the Des Moines show, where the momentum seemed to build.

Nothing could please the sisters more.

Because although they were paid $6,300 for their two years of work and have their initials carved into the trees on either side of the rug, the work is "all about Virginia," Toby said.

Moreover, it's the only work of the sort the sisters will ever do because doing it was such an overarching task. "If it wasn't in our hands, it was on our minds," Toby said.

Now that it's passed from their hands, Georgia and Toby hope the rug will serve as a kind of welcome mat to others interested in exploring the life and works of Virginia Hamilton.