Though not latch-hooking, this is a rug-making curiosity. Pater Textiles, of 19 Rampart Street, London, sold rug-making kits containing textile offcuts (a long, wide strip left over from a bolt of fabric) and hessian backing sufficient to make a 6 ft x 3 ft rag rug. Each kit contained several colours, an instruction leaflet and suggested designs. The rug-maker needed to cut the offcuts into strips for making rag rugs, and were provided in assorted colours. The leaflet provided design ideas.

Rampart Street, Whitechapel, East London, is in an area famous for textile and garment workshops i.e. the "rag trade." With its high immigrant population, and until the era of cheap imported garments, it was full of sweatshops making large volumes of cheap clothing. The famous Petticoat Lane (Wentworth Street Market) is in this area. Pater Textiles mainly traded in various types of fabric direct from the mills. Browsing gazetteers for 1949 finds other textile companies registered at neighbouring addresses, and all along nearby Commercial Road. Later on, the company produced a catalogue - "Pater's Gazette" - which was advertised in national and regional newspapers.

The rug-kits allowed the company to sell pieces of cloth too small for the garment-makers to home rug-makers. The rug-maker benefited by getting unworn fabric (instead of cutting up old clothes) in predictable and sufficient quantities of different colours to make fashionable patterns. The lengths of fabric were packed in a hessian sack that could be used as the rug-backing. This use of leftover materials was analogous to woollen mills selling thrums - wool offcuts from the carpet looms - to home rugmakers.

Pater Textiles appear to have been established in 1937. The Rug Kit leaflet shown her is the 4th edition. There's little information about Pater Textiles rug kits except for adverts between 1947 and 1958, after which the company presumably stopped selling rug kits and concentrated on selling fabrics. They were still trading in textiles in 1982, this being the most recent advert I could find, when they were advertising fake fur fabrics. East London's garment-making trade declined when ready-made cheap clothing was increasingly imported, particularly from Asia and the area became rundown.

Pater's warehouse at 19 Rampart Street (on the corner with Sly Street) had been the Kinder Arms pub until 1910. Many of the buildings on this street were warehouses and as the local garment industry declined these became vacant and run-down. The area was regenerated in 2008 and the historic warehouses were converted into apartment buildings. 19 Rampart Street is now an attractive apartment building.