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.

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. 

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. 

i worked intuitively, going where my mood took me, color-wise and complexity-wise. some are very simple with big fields of one color and maybe a single subtle stripe at each end, some have many colors. some are mostly blues and greens and others are mostly pinks and oranges. they are a record of the days and the moods of my summer, woven into cloth.

the rainbow sherbet tones are all the same - summery and light, but there are no two alike. each one is unique. they complement one another, but are each complete in their own right. weaving is such a metaphor for life. time and threads woven into something useful and beautiful. 

even olga approves. and as summer winds down, i will turn back to my taylor swift weaving project. i have to decide whether 1989 or red is next. what do you think?