Jean Louise Berg Thiessen was born in 1876 to Swedish immigrants in Sacramento, CA. By 1886, she and her family migrated to Omaha, NE, where she became a seamstress and used her earnings to help support her family. Not much else is known about the artist, but her son, Leonard Thiessen, became highly influential in the arts in Nebraska and credited his mother with sharing a creative spirit and encouraging him to pursue work as an artist. “Me in the Garden” is a textile mosaic made from strips of felted woven textile salvaged from hat bodies. The strips are laid on their side and stitched together on the reverse to create a picture of a house, trees, sky, grass, flowers, creek, a bench and table, and a self-portrait of the artist with an armful of flowers. Her face is made from a piece of felt enhanced with painted features. Created in the 1930s, Jean’s on-edge felt technique is similar to standing wool rugs but appears to be entirely her own invention. Handmade decorative rugs emerged in the United States during the 19th century when covering bare wood floors with carpets and rugs came into vogue. Women quickly turned to fabric scraps and other leftover materials to create rugs and coverings themselves, bringing resourcefulness and originality to their designs. Thiessen exhibited these works in local arts and crafts shows, where they received considerable attention and praise as “fancy rugs.” Today, these works are labeled as mosaics because the surviving works do not show signs of wear, indicating they were not used as functional rugs and instead were valued as artistic creations.