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.
Sunday, October 05, 2025
Thursday, October 02, 2025
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.
Thursday, September 11, 2025
catching up
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i really loved reading this piece about books.
Saturday, August 23, 2025
my first højskole experience
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.
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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.
Monday, August 11, 2025
i tried a therabot on chatgpt
my sister moving back to the town where we grew up has surfaced a lot of old memories. her move back coincided with my high school class's 40th reunion, which i did not attend, being that i live 7 time zones away across the atlantic. less than half the class attended, as it turns out and most didn't have the excuse of living in another country. i did exchange a few mails with one of the organizers and she sent a few pictures. this resulted in me learning some unsettling news about some of my old classmates that i had been blissfully unaware of. and now that i'm no longer blissfully unaware, i find myself thinking about it quite a lot. which is honestly just about the last thing i want to do. but brains don't always do what we would like them to.
enter chatgpt. i tried a therabot gpt that was made by someone who does logotherapy. i didn't really know what that was, but i decided to give it a whirl. and can i just say that it was incredibly helpful. like rather unbelievably so. great insight and it really helped me reframe the thoughts i was having. i was able to dig into why i was so shaken by the news that i learned and it gave me multiple helpful ways of thinking about it and processing it.
and i realize this all sounds very vague, but since it's related to a story that is most decidedly not mine to tell, i have to be vague. but i just wanted to say that although i have mixed feelings about large language models, the conversation i had with the therabot really genuinely helped me. ten out of ten, highly recommend.
Sunday, August 10, 2025
summer flew by but i have something to show for it
i was drinking a cup of tea this morning with husband out on the terrace. the sun is shining, but you can already feel the nip of fall in the air. where did the summer go so fast? one of the things i like about weaving is that i can see where the time has gone in a physical object. we made this rainbow sherbet warp on june 29th and yesterday, i clipped it off the loom. i spent 6:39:49 yesterday clipping and hemming and now i have 21 finished rainbow sherbet tea towels to show for my summer.
i track my weaving time using the toggl app and these 21 towels took up 75:56:54 hours and minutes of my summer. some days, i just wove for 20 minutes, other days, i spent hours. i tried different color combinations and stripes of different widths. i looked at madras plaids and tried to duplicate them.
Sunday, July 13, 2025
long time no see
hey y'all, it's been awhile. time seems to fly by these days, but now that it's summer, it's starting to slow down a little bit. i finally had time to get a cut & color and i went a little shorter for summer.
my summer weaving project is what i'm calling the rainbow sherbet tea towels. i've not abandoned my taylor swift eras tea towel project, but i decided to take a little break over the summer, while i plan the next ones. i know what colors i want to work with, but i don't know yet know what i want to learn from the next one - maybe a whole new, more complicated setup? so i did another rainbow warp. everyone loves the rainbow tea towels and this will give me some to have on hand.
i had some time this weekend to work on them and i've finished four so far. i should get around 20 from this warp. it's so relaxing to sit at the loom and play with color as i listen to cozy mystery novels. i'm currently listening to anthony horowitz's hawthorne series. he probably wouldn't like that i call them cozy mysteries, but there you have it.
last weekend, i acquired this loom. it's a little bigger than my big loom and i will assemble it upstairs, to have even more weaving projects underway. unfortunately, i discovered over the past week, after bringing it in the house, that it is permeated with the most awful cigarette smell from years of standing in the home of a heavy smoker. i'm not sure how i didn't realize that when we picked it up. it only became apparent when we brought it inside here at home. it's really awful. i got some rodalon — a special cleaning product that removes odors and i spent a lot of time scrubbing it down and cleaning it this weekend. i think it's going to work. i removed the søller (again, i realize i don't know weaving vocabulary in english) and soaked them in my jasmine-scented wool wash. it took FOUR baths to get rid of the yellow nicotine, but i think i have saved them. i'm not yet done washing down all of the parts of the loom, but i think it's working and i will be able to save it.