weekend getaway

our local creative group went on our yearly trip down to the bottom lefthand corner of denmark - højer. (is that how we're supposed to describe a country? i think maybe the picture in my head is too related to the map.) we've been going for quite some years now. there's an affordable big old house we can rent where we can all sleep (it sleeps 13) and an atelier where we can paint and dance and make a mess. and we did all of that. plus making ourselves some lovely food and drinking slightly too much wine and snaps and something called a half bitter that tasted a bit like christmas.  four ladies of the ladies are in their 80s and they are all super cool and fun, each in their own way. i hope to be as curious, funny and spry as they all are should i reach their age. 

one of them painted this watercolor of some members of the group when we went to the beach. i had immediately gone down towards the water, so i'm not in this one. i was wearing clothes that blended into the landscape anyway. 

we all go on these weekends needing something different. some need companionship and people to talk to. some need a break and a change of scenery. i think we all want to be creative. we all bring too many materials. i took four knitting projects (i worked on 3 of them), some watercolors, some journals, fabric and hand-dyed embroidery wool and my linoleum cutting tools. i had no idea what i would want to work on. i think what i ultimately wanted to work on was the food that i made. i bought some beautiful raviolis at the italian supermarket in copenhagen and made three different sauces for them for everyone to enjoy on friday. 

of course, i found myself wanting to work on a knitting project that i hadn't brought along. that's the way it always is. you think you're bringing all the options you have then your brain thinks of something new when it can't have it. at least i restrained from buying new year. and that in spite of visiting a yarn shop! all i brought home were sausages from the local butcher and enough renewed energy from all the laughter to last the week.

the emerald jade bathroom

remember that cool floor we got in what's now my weaving studio? now there's one in our upstairs bathroom as well! we're thinking of it as the emerald jade room now! it just went in this morning, so it's not even dry yet. i'll share more photos when it is dry. we're going to leave this one high gloss (we think). soon we'll have a full bathroom that we can use! i can't wait! the never-ending house project marches forward. 

weaving secret messages

i'm not sure if i've mentioned this here, but husband is the kind of guy who is utterly unafraid to rethink things. so after we added the new roof a few years ago, he decided to move the stairs to get to the second floor from where he had originally thought they would be. this involved building a couple of extra meters onto the back of the house. as one does. but it being a rather large undertaking and him being a one-man show, he has discovered that they don't match up 100% as accurately as he would have liked. he thinks this can be hidden by covering that portion of the ceiling with a really cool weaving. 

as one has the weaving bug, i am on board with this, so i am very deep in planning what said weaving should look like. it's not a tiny undertaking, as it's 166cm wide and about 6 meters long. times two. so needless to say, i am looking for inspiration, as i'm still a baby weaver. i know that my loom can handle whatever i throw its way, as it's much more experienced and wise than i am. 

i have this idea that whatever i weave, needs to contain a secret, meaningful message. and since i've been spending a lot of time in the studio, working on a podcast for work, it hit me that it would be possible to weave sound waves. they would look like a cool pattern and if you knew what it represented, it would also contain a message. since that occurred to me, i can't shake the idea. i recorded a meaningful message in the studio the other day and took a photo of the sound wave. i think it has potential.

i ordered up a bunch of weaving books from the library. this one about danish weaver bodil bødtker-næss had some very interesting inspiration in it. it was all i could do not to write and underline everywhere in the book, but i did restrain. i've definitely got to order this one so that i can write in my own copy.

and fold down a bunch of pages, like this one. she wove panels to divide a big open office space for danske bank back in the 70s. they don't look entirely unlike sound waves, eh?

this one could also have a sound wave vibe.

and this one definitely does. i don't think i will directly copy any of these, but they do give me some ideas for how i could approach this. combined with the idea of mounting a weaving on a wooden frame, which i saw at hanne vedel's workshop, i think an idea is forming. but i've yet to settle on a color scheme. i'm doing a few watercolor sketches to try to work out some ideas. i think husband will even build a tiny miniature version of the frames we might want to mount the weavings on, so we can create a paper version. 

i made a test sheet with all of my potential colors. i got some cool gansai tambi japanese watercolors to play with. 

the planning is half the fun. but husband is impatient for me to get started. i'm not even sure yet what kind of yarn to use - linen? wool? cotton? it's quite the adventure.

danish weaver hanne vedel

the amazing danish weaver hanne vedel, who is 94 and still weaving, held an open house during the autumn holiday last week. we went to visit her. she was taught to weave by cis fink, one of the classic old danish weaving teachers who originally owned my loom. this photo above is of hanne vedel on the left and emmy, my personal weaving teacher and the one who gave me my loom, which once belonged to cis fink. i feel so privileged to have met hanne vedel and even more privileged to own a loom with such history. 

hanne vedel is one of the most prolific and famous danish weavers of the 20th century. this is a bolt of cloth that she wove for the curtains for the upgrade of the trustee council chamber (also known here in denmark as the finn juhl chamber) at the UN building in new york. so simple, but so beautiful. 

we spent nearly two hours at her studio, just looking at everything and being inspired. this wall hanging gave me an idea for some weavings that i want to do for our home (more about that in another post soon).

i need to weave some long panels for a steeply vaulted wall above our stairs and i've been pondering how we could fix them to the wall so that they don't sag. this might be a way to approach it. 

this work looked different, depending on the angle you stood in relation to it. i'm not sure my project will be able to do that because you can never get up high enough to look at it from the one angle, but it was inspiring nonetheless.

i sent husband past her studio on the monday after our visit, so that he could look at the frame this piece was mounted on. now i just have to figure out my version. 

hanne vedel is still actively weaving. she had projects set up on two looms. this one, involving horse hair, was also super inspiring. i have so many ideas now and not enough time or enough looms to execute them all!

now i just need to find someone with a horse that wants to trim its mane or tail. 

look how lovely that it is! simple but beautiful.

hanne vedel had run spinderigaard, a spinnery, for many years and so i scored some lovely wool and silk cones. it's enough to make a lovely scarf or something. i love those greenish speckles. i got some with black speckles as well. 

 

a first look at stitched journeys

my dream of a tiny house built out of my great grandmother's quilts is now a reality! i will put a couple of small stools in there and on the day of the exhibition, i plan to (i hope) record people's stories of their own journeys. more about this soon. i'm exhausted from two days of setting up the whole exhibition. we have more than 60 works this year and it looks really great! i'm working on a video that will show everything. we just have to put on a few finishing touches on the exhibition before it's ready. it's a good one! people were clearly inspired by our theme of the journey starts here.  

the journey starts here

it's nearly time for our yearly exhibition in creagive. the theme this year is "rejsen starter her" or "the journey starts here." i'm making a little house which will have a wooden frame and it will be enclosed by my great grandmother's quilt tops. people will be invited to come inside and tell a travel story. i want to record their stories, so i think i'm going to set up my traveling podcast recording studio inside my quilt house. 

i think sometimes about all the stories those quilts tell. stories that i don't know. i wrote about them here, when i exhibited them a few years ago at my favorite little museum down in randbøldal. i think i'll call my work "stitched journeys" and i'll invite people to record a bit of their story, so that their stories can be part of the shared fabric of the journey we're all on. i feel like the world could use a bit more of that these days. 

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i loved this substack piece on collecting books.

though unlike the author, i absolutely love writing in books and even have to control myself not to write in library books. sometimes without success. which is rather a bad thing because i currently have a bunch of library books on weaving checked out. i'm frantically looking for copies of them in used bookstores, so i can buy them and write all i want. 

catching up

my current wips. i haven't knitted all summer. summer weather just isn't really the vibe for knitting. but i went to the knitting group on tuesday and got some help with two of the projects (the yellow vest) and the loosely-woven white shawl/swimsuit cover-up. the weather is turning a bit cooler, though we've had a lovely indian summer of late, and so it feels like knitting time again.

the child and her good friend headed off to lisbon on tuesday. school starts next week. she sent me a load of pictures today from their exploration of the city. we were going to accompany them down there, but husband has a big audit at work next week, and so the timing wasn't good. we decided we'll go in november when it's rainy and dark here and the girls are settled in. 

we had a lot of fun with the girls - roping them in to helping at the harvest market at the museum (we took a little break in the new kro stue here). we did puzzles and played cards and explored the area and ate some good food and drank some wine and watched real housewives. it was all quite relaxed and chill and just what we needed.

i joined noma's coffee club and i fear i will never be the same. that buku sayisa is absolutely incredible. we haven't tried the chelchele yet. we're trying to savor it. husband is also crazy for it. it isn't cheap, but we've decided we're worth it. life truly is too short for crap coffee.

i've started on my next set of taylor swift tea towels. i'm doing speak now this time, as i had all the colors and they work perfectly for the setup i want to play with this time. i've only just started - i'm still trying out all of the colors in a section at the start, to get acquainted. i found a mistake and managed to fix it. the loom never lies, it shows you everything. 

i think i'm coming down with the first cold of the season. my throat is sore and i'm achy in my shoulders. it seems like the change of season is always accompanied by a bug. it's no doubt also a result of slowing down after running around for several weeks. and of staying up half the night, watching the news of charlie kirk being shot. i'd like to say i have mixed feelings about that, but i honestly don't. these people don't face the consequences of their toxicity very often. i wonder if we won't look back and realize that the civil war had already begun.

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i really loved reading this piece about books.