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Steamboat Springs — Dixie Coyle fishes around for a minute with a small metal hook and pulls out a thin strip of red fabric. She stabs through the fabric again and fishes out another loop of fabric.

Again and again she does this until it seems that she is opening or healing a wound.

"It's fun just to see it happen," Coyle said while while sitting in her workshop, surrounded by a countless number of rugs and stacks of fabric waiting to become rugs. "It's addicting. There is the peace of it, the harmony of it. It's like painting a picture with wool."

Her addiction has turned her into a prolific rug maker. Where most rug hookers may only finish one or two projects each year, Coyle usually completes one rug a month.

Her work is almost Art Brut, with child-like drawings of landscapes and farm animals -- a style that comes from primitive 1800s American rug making.

Coyle has a library of history books on rug hooking, and it was always the rough lines from the antique designs that fascinated her.

On the floor of her living room, she has a piece copied from a design by Magdalina Brinner, who made rugs between 1870 and 1890.

Coyle's rugs will be on display along with others by Steamboat's large population of rug hookers.

"We must have the biggest per capita of (rug) hookers in the United States," Coyle said. For a small town, Steamboat Springs has more than 30 women who meet regularly to work on their hooking projects and the number is growing.

Coyle now runs three monthly groups for rug hookers. Participants vary in age from 40 to 70. Coyle started the first group four years ago, but the numbers became unmanageable, and she started two more.

Each year, she hosts a three-day rug-hooking camp with nationally known rug-hooking teachers. People signed up for her camp more than eight months ago, and there is a waiting list.

Most of the people who get interested in rug hooking already are involved in fiber arts such as quilting, needlepoint or knitting. Coyle was a spinner and off-loom weaver before she started making rugs.

"People like it because it's functional and decorative and they're expensive to purchase because of all the hours that go into making them," Coyle said.

Friday's show will be the first rug-hooking exhibit by the Dyed in the Wool Rug Hookers of Steamboat. And they won't be having another one for years to come.

The 90 pieces entered in the show represent four years worth of work and Coyle imagines it would take another three or four years to make enough work for another show.

When Coyle isn't giving rug-hooking lessons or making her own rugs, she is selling fabric and rug-hooking supplies.

"I don't make a lot of money," she said. "I am just trying to afford my own habit."

Coyle said she met many of her best friends through rug hooking.

"It's a very diverse group, but we all have the same passion for color, a passion for working with our hands and for creativity."