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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* * *
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.
* * *
i really loved reading this piece about books.
what a week! i spent the week at skals højskole, which specializes in handicrafts like sewing, knitting, embroidery and weaving. i was, of course, there for the weaving. i wanted to try out a weaving course, since in a couple of years, i will start the weaving education. i had to find out if it was for me. after a week there, it's safe to say that it is.
we were 8 on our course and so we set up 8 looms with enough warp to each get to weave a sample of the different techniques on each one. we worked in blue and white and all of the techniques were japanese. we had a wide range of experience. i've been around looms for more than a decade but only really started learning in earnest in the past year. four had been weaving for years. two had never been around a loom before. and one was a design student who had done a bit of weaving on a smaller loom and had some idea of how things worked. happily, our teacher was excellent at making sure we all got the help we needed.
here are all of the things i tried - wool ikat, double weave in cotton, a sashiko technique, also in cotton, shibori dyeing in cotton and in wool, ikat in linen, a double-woven rag rug and a little piece with paper that i drew on in watercolors. it was fun to try weaving with materials i hadn't used before. i really enjoyed learning the shibori techniques - the folded fabric looks super cool, even if i don't really know what i would use it for. i am not fond of linen. it is a bit finicky. i think probably the ones that i might use are the double weave (the medium blue with the small white crosses on towards the left) and the sashiko (the dark blue with white stitches just above).
it was a lovely place. the food was incredible. the garden green and lush. there were other courses going on and it was wonderful to spend a whole week being creative in the company of other creative people.
* * *
i always loved the story of lucy, but didn't realize until now that a professor from asu is the one who discovered her. i guess i didn't know because he wasn't an asu professor at the time, but he went on to found the institute of human origins at asu and is retired now after 50 years. he must have been there when i was there. too bad i never took one of his classes.
