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.

colors of kindness warp

here's how my colors of kindness warp turned out. i'm so grateful to my friend emmy for helping me make it yesterday! i spent all my time choosing colors and deciding when to add the next one and change it out and didn't learn as much as i should have about actually making the warp, but that was also something. and there will be more warps to make. this one will be tea towels where i play with color, learning what it does to this rainbow of colors when you weave in with only one color or another. it'll be a few weeks before i have time to dress the loom, as i'm really busy with work, but i can't wait. 

i learned a new thing today!

i went to a course today to learn løbbinding. i keep learning stuff in danish and then not knowing what it's called in english. i had to search løbbinding on pinterest and hope that it showed me some pins in english too. it did. they're coiled baskets. it was fun. 

first, you make a coil of fabric bound in some kind of fun yarn. i had a piece of an old duvet cover and i chose some glittery, hairy yarn for texture. you wrap it around, making a kind of rope of the fabric. 

then you choose some other fun yarns and start making the coil for the bottom of the basket. you wind the yarn around and use a large, blunt needle to sew it fast to the yarn underneath. you want a good, solid bottom.

my bottom. i imagine once i've made a few more, i'll look back and think this wasn't really tight enough, but it seemed pretty good to me today. and i loved the colorful, hairy yarn. yup, i'm gonna need more yarn. 

after some time, i changed to a different yarn to try out a different effect. i learned that it didn't look as good when you wrapped it around as it looked as the ball of yarn. but it was good to vary the design, so i used it anyway and let plenty of the sparkly hairy yarn i used to wrap the fabric show through. it had a pretty good effect.

i couldn't help myself and i took a basket of colorful yarn along, even though materials were part of the course. the last two rounds, i used some of it, to try out another effect.

i liked it! the pink was some kind of toweling that wouldn't be easy to sew, so i wrapped it around my base coil and then sewed it to the bowl with some orange thread that has a few sequins on it, for a bit more sparkle.

it's fun because it's perfectly ok to finish it off a little bit knobbly and wonky, and so i did. of course, i have loads of fabrics and yarn and other lovely things at home, so i can make more. this definitely seems like something i could easily work on while watching tv in the evening and would be a much better use of my time than playing homescapes.

everyone's baskets were so different, even though we all had the same starting point. i think you could see everyone's personality reflected in their work. and how different, diverse, colorful and lovely they all were! i can't wait to make more!

printmaking and the fog of living in a global pandemic

i learned a new sort of printmaking this weekend - collography. we used cardboard, rather than copper. i loved the elusive nature of it, though it felt like it took a couple of prints before i got my head around it and obviously i still have much to learn. it's different than linoprints. i also loved that each one only makes one or two prints. there's something appealing about it being a monoprint. i feel intrigued by the fact that there's only one chance.

i have cacti on the brain, so i made two. and i ended up feeling that what i really need is a scalpel that i can draw with. curves are a bit difficult. i also came away feeling that i need a press. you definitely need one that rolls the print through to do these, as just pressing down, like you can get away with on a linoprint, is not possible. there's always more art supplies that you can acquire.

i've been seeing people on instagram that are doing collography using packaging as the base. i took the packaging from my burrata and i really love the result.

having linocut experience, i hollowed out the small spots to make them, forgetting that they'd fill with ink and actually end up black. the instructor said i could cut out small bits of paper and make them be white. i like how that turned out. 

i did a quick last print, just before the end of the day, drawing a small bowl and decorating it with a couple of leaves. i actually made two of this print. i kept it simple, thinking that i'd maybe do some stitching on it or add a bit of my old favorite payne's grey. 

* * *

january seemed so long. like it was the longest january ever. but i made it to today, the last day. it was also the last day of my current job. i reluctantly leave behind my very good colleagues, but i am looking forward to starting something new tomorrow, something that's perhaps a bit more up my alley. i love starting something new and i'm very much looking forward to jumping in with both feet.

* * *

and speaking of never-ending, i've been thinking a lot lately and talking to people about this whole pandemic thing and what it's done to us. i don't think we even know. i just wrote a completely ragey letter to the church where sophia, the twin we lost, is buried. we renew the grave once a year and i somehow missed the first letter about it. so they send a reminder that horribly threatens to dig her up and throw her away. not quite in those words, but not that far from it. and even after 21 years, it upsets me greatly. i feel like i missed that first letter in the fog that has settled upon us with the monotony of the pandemic. tomorrow, all the restrictions are lifted here in denmark and i don't really know what i think about that. three colleagues today announced that they have tested positive and one more was sick as well, though i never heard a test result. i had a negative test yesterday, which i got on a whim because i saw that there was no line at the test center and i was there anyway. so, i've escaped the virus so far, but not the fog that has settled over all of us.

an old friend has been pondering the pandemic as well. read her take here.

trying something new: life drawing

yesterday, i tried out croquis/life drawing for the first time. it's never really appealed to me before because i consider myself someone who doesn't draw people.

our local art group has started up a regular søndagscroquis here in the new year, ever other week, so i decided i'd go along to support it. i was surprised to find that i quite liked it.

as you can see, we had a male model. he was tall, middle-aged and totally naked. it was amazing how quickly you forget about that and just look for the shapes and the lines, sketching quickly. we did a number of exercises - warming up in the start with him changing position every 30 seconds, hence some of these pages having several versions on one page.

i actually liked the quick changing of positions better than when he posed for longer. i found that i couldn't keep drawing him in the same position for 10 minutes. or even 5. one minute was about right for me.

i think that all those horses i drew as a kid served me well in looking for the shapes and proportions. i don't think i ever completely let go of any tension i felt about drawing a person, but i stepped in that direction and i will definitely be going back again in two weeks.

five things friday :: november 1

#fivethingsfriday
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thing 1: it’s a new month, so i took a new route today, exploring roads that were new to me. husband says it makes our brains grow. and i’d like to think he’s right. at the very least, i saw some fall colors and this church, which looked pretty despite the drab, grey day.
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thing 2: new episodes of queer eye! in japan! it makes husband being stuck late at work on a friday night more bearable. #imnotcryingyourecrying #teamyokosakuma
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thing 3: when husband said he would be late and foiled my plans of a dinner out, i decided to make myself some soup. husband isn’t a fan of soup (one of his few faults), but i figured i could just please me, since he wasn’t home. and please me i did -i roasted two eggplants, a whole cauliflower and a head of garlic in the oven. they were drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with sesame seeds and herb salt. meanwhile, i sautéed three leeks in butter and bit of my homemade herb salt and thawed out a container of herbed chicken broth I had in the freezer (thank you past me). once the veggies were roasted, i popped them into the broth, along with the buttery leeks and blitzed it all up with my immersion blender. i had planned to add a bit of cream, but it was so rich, smoky (thank you, eggplant) and delicious that it didn’t even need it.
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thing 4: learning new things these days. it’s stretching my brain in the best ways. it is as much a physical process as a mental one.
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thing 5: i’ve been thinking this week about The Muse - who it is, where it is, how to make it appear. i suspect it’s really just about hard work and regular practice -whether it’s an artistic muse or a writing muse. the muse might actually just be discipline and practice. #revolutionary #impracticing

drawing the threads together

i know i just lamented that autumn filled me with dread, but this evening, on the way home from my weaving group, it was just gorgeous. small tendrils of fog sneaking into the low spots, the blueish light that contains hints of the winter ahead descending, leaving trees to stand as starkly beautiful silhouettes, still clad in their leaves for now. it's strangely warm, it was still 13°C this evening, which probably explains the fog. it was a good day, spent at two different small museums, stretching my brain around how tablet weaving works, as well as how to create different patterns and a wider band on a small band loom. i am so fortunate to have amazing women in my life who know all about these things and who are patiently helping me rewire my brain. once again, i am struck that in weaving, i find deeper meaning - how we draw together the threads of our lives and find depth and beauty. my threads are still a bit tangled, but days like today move me in the right direction.

making pottery is hard

three whole days of creativity. turns out operating a pottery wheel successfully is rather difficult. and while you can manage to make something in only three days, it might be a bit on the wonky side. but i enjoyed decorating my creations very much. and i enjoyed spending three days in a wonderful creative space.

the weather was crazy over the weekend, covering all the seasons in the space of a few minutes. it was good to be inside at the wheel. even if the wheel was very difficult.

a few of the pieces i ended up making. they'll be glazed and fired and i'll be able to take them home in early june. looking forward to seeing how they look when they're finished!

and now, packing up my suitcase and getting ready for the week ahead. yoga, seafood and brussels on the horizon. it seems life is as ever-shifting as the weather around here...

what if?

what if....

~ you decided to let the petty irritations (irritators?) of life just wash over you? and decided not to react to them, but to just feel your reaction and go with the flow of it.

~ you gave people another chance, even if you were ready to write them off? and you actually tried to see the good in them, as difficult as it may seem?

~ what if the reason you were writing them off was largely due to how they looked? (and how shallow would that be of you?)

~ you could learn something from the experience?

~ those challenging people were placed in your path for a reason? even if you couldn't really see what that reason was. and you just trusted that it would become apparent with the fullness of time?

~ being able to to react differently meant a new beginning? and a new approach to life? and a new deeper sort of happiness?

i stayed up to 'til the wee hours discussing exactly this with a good friend the other night. it was precisely what i needed at that moment. amazing how you find your way to precisely what you need when you really need it. now to just remember it when the time comes. it's so easy to just revert to your fallback patterns and ways of reacting. but i think that this time i'm so interested in seeing what happens if i change that i'll remember our talk.

aside: i wish i could find my way to a lightheartedness with such posts that i once had. i wonder what's happened to it? i feel so deadly serious when i sit down to write these days.  i'd like to be fun again, but i can't seem to find my way out of the earnestness at the moment. i'm not sure why that is... but rest assured it's even more annoying to me than it is to you.

exhausted in a good way

this blurry sunset photo, taken at the end of my day, well after it was way too dark to take a photo, perfectly matches how i feel right now. it's got a warm glow, but it's just not in focus. i had a long and full day of learning exciting new things and while that's wonderful, it's also exhausting. especially because we stood up for most of the day. if i'd known it was going to be standing up all day, i'd definitely have worn different shoes. my feet went from complaining to not speaking to me to cautious rapprochement here after i came home and showered and put them up for awhile. they will undoubtedly have a strong opinion about what shoes i wear tomorrow.

this week has been amazing so far. but it does tire you out in a completely different way than putting around home, writing a little bit here and there, taking some leisurely photos and then perusing pinterest for dinner ideas does. i'm loving every minute of it tho'.

probably one of the biggest challenges (other than remembering people's names), is learning a whole new corporate language. i've never been in a company that made consumer products before (unless you count microsoft and i was arguably in a B2B corner of that behemoth). it seems there's a whole language around the way you speak of pricing and intellectual property and licensing and play experiences and buyers and gift givers and moms and DNA and built-in toilets when you're a toy company. and i had a prolonged exposure to all of that today. it's like trying to decode a language that sounds vaguely familiar, but which also seems like total gobbledygook. and it's pretty exhausting. even while it's also exhilirating.

but i'm trying to remember that you can only have new experiences once before they aren't new anymore and i'm doing my best to enjoy every minute and everything i'm learning and doing. it's such a creative, positive atmosphere that i can't really do anything other than enjoy the ride, wherever it's going to take me. and right now, it's going to take me to bed. my brain says it's time to shut down and let it get on with the processing. i'm sure that tonight i'll be dreaming of lego.

when you are ready, the right teacher will come along

before our fabulous weekend away, i emailed the girls and asked if anyone could teach me how to crochet a granny square while we were there. i threw in some yarn and some crochet hooks, just in case. my dear friend elizabeth tried to teach me a couple of years ago, but i'll be the first to admit that i never really caught on.

but somehow, on saturday evening, it clicked for me and i made the granny square above. and i don't even have the feeling, which i had the first time around, that i would go completely blank if asked to make a second one. i took my early attempts along to show the girls and you can see them here, together with the blue and grey one that i made on saturday. as you can see, i have really learned it now, whereas some of the others ended up with two centers and weren't  even remotely square.

i learned something else about how totally free you can be when you crochet (way more so than with knitting). you can really just crochet in all directions. it was rather amusing because when i first started the square, i was sweating from the effort and had to take off my scarf and sweater (i don't think it was a hot flash, just the hard work of learning something new). i also forgot to breathe a couple of times, from the sheer concentrated effort. that wasn't so good, but it did make everyone laugh. but then, i relaxed and just crocheted. maybe it was because one of the others crocheted the white thing above and there was so much freedom in it - no sense of right and wrong, but just where the yarn takes you. i think it took realizing that for it to click for me.

i started crocheting a circle after my first square, just to give it a try. and it stayed flat and didn't become a nest (that has happened before) and i got into a kind of rhythm with it. and it felt somehow freeing. and tho' my effort wasn't nearly as free as christina's little white lichen? snowflake? seafoam? thing, i felt like i had learned it at last. and i will get more free with it and i'll undoubtedly show you the results right here.

check it out, i even managed to crochet a little jacket for a stone! funny how sometimes it just takes learning something at the right moment. i don't think i was ready to do granny squares before and now i am. just imagine what i'm going to do with all those pins on my must learn to crochet (or knit or whatever) board on pinterest....

truffles anyone?

hendrick's gin, fresh blueberries, fizzy water

i've been reading jean-anthelme brillat-savarin's physiology of taste (or transcendental gastronomy). just his name should give you a bit of a taste of what a stuck-up, pretentious prat he is. and tho' i am largely skimming (what else can one do via an eReader? i can't take reading seriously unless i can scribble in the margins), i went back and forth between eye-rolling and being provoked to ponderous deep thoughts to the occasional actual (and thus no kittens killed) laugh out loud. because tho' he's full of himself, he is witty in a kind of 18th century aristocratic, truffle-scoffing sort of way.

just his quasi-scientific method alone is worth the read...listing and categorizing and hierarchizing what is essentially an exploration of the pleasures of eating and drinking. and oddly, much of it still rings true today.

he opens with a self-congratulatory mini biography, extolling his own virtues as a truly excellent man of taste and cultivation. i somehow picture him as a cross between ben franklin and george washington in appearance, which is odd, since he's french, but there you have it. he says that he was satisfied with the simplest meal one could set before him, if it was just prepared artistically (emphasis mine). that's actually quite pretentious, but i like it. and i subscribe to the notion that care should be taken with the food we eat on a daily basis (tho' it may not always resemble art (see recent attempt to make homemade pita bread)). and frankly, often the simplest food is the most artistic (think japanese). tho' i imagine that he would think the simplest meal should contain truffles (he waxes lyrical about them for nearly 7 pages). and really, truffles are delicious.

but my favorite bit is the section about thirst. because inevitably, he gets around to talking about alcohol. and as you know, i am practically a daily inventor of new cocktails (what? you didn't know? you should really come around more often.). so, without reading the whole thing, i hereby declare my favorite passage to be:

alcohol is the monarch of liquids, and takes possession of the extreme tastes of the palate. its various preparations offer us countless new flavors, and to certain medicinal remedies, it gives an energy they could not do well without.

alcohol as royalty with medicinal properties? let's drink to that.

* * *

an explanatory note: as you know, a group of us are taking advantage of the free course materials available through MIT and are taking a course together. (not for credit, just for fun.) we were interested in two courses and have managed to shuffle the syllabi and combine them - so that we are writing a cool eZine on the topic of food and culture as our end goal. we're just getting started and it's not too late to join us if that sounds appealing. this post represents our first assignment. if you'd like to join us, check out facebook group here, or leave me a comment and i'll gladly invite you.

reading out in the corners

i am a frequent borrower at my local library. there's this brilliant service (bibliotek.dk) where you can order books from any library in the country and they send them to your local library. when they come, you get an SMS and then you pick them up and read them. i'm always ordering strange and esoteric things like postmodern theory from the mid-90s, books about early soviet textiles or artists that were popular in the 50s or else the entire collected works of whoever has just won the nobel prize for literature. as one of the librarians said today, "you're really out in the corners."

i laughed when she said it, because it really is true. but of course, i had to think about it afterwards as well. what does it really mean to be out in the corners? i hasten to say that it was said and meant in a kind way and was not at all an insult. we were laughing because very often when i go to check out my reserved books, the self-service machine won't allow me to do it - it always wants some other number or says that the book doesn't exist in the system or some such error. this means i very often have to go to the desk and have someone help me. in this way, i've gotten to know all of the library personnel very well. which is how the "you're really out in the corners" comment came about.

i took it as another way of saying off the beaten path. when i look for my books on the reserved shelves, i see a lot of self-help, how-to books, cookbooks, contemporary crime novels (i do order my share of those at times) and those infernal 50 shades books. those are all on the beaten path, down the middle, ordinary. today i picked up the tom phillips book (he's the artist who did the humument altered book i told you about a few days ago). at the same time i returned slavoj zizek's latest tome, less than nothing: hegel and the shadow of dialetical materialism. i'll admit i only read a couple of chapters of it, not the whole thing. i go for such a book occasionally to exercise my brain (this was, i will say, one of the more lucid zizek since sublime object of ideology) and to remind me of the thrills i found in grad school. but of late, i've also been reading douglas kennedy novels, which aren't exactly lacanian marxism.

which leads me to another aspect of what it might mean to read out in the corners - to read broadly, all over the spectrum, thoroughly in some sense, covering all the bases. i like that idea too. i read a lot and i love reading. i can't go to sleep at night without it. sometimes i want to read to relax. sometimes to think and be challenged. sometimes to help me figure out what my opinion is. sometimes to enlighten. sometimes to learn. sometimes just to be entertained. sometimes to get lost. reading can give you so many different experiences and feelings - the whole spectrum, really. and i guess that's what it really means to be out in the corners.

* * *

how charming are these diving pigs?

a new take on stitched-up photos

i took a weekend embroidery course with artist anne brodersen at her studio out in ringkøbing, near the west coast of denmark. it wasn't a typical embroidery course, where you learn stitches, but where we learned some unique new techniques for combining embroidery and photography and embroidery and other materials (like sticks and stones found on the beach). in addition to learning some really inspiring new techniques, my very soul feels renewed.

we took a photo with good lines to it and traced out the best of those lines with a pen. then, using a lightbox (must have husband build me one of those), we transferred those lines onto a sheet of handmade paper that could withstand stitching. then, with two black threads, we stitched those outlines. i chose this photo of husband looking down at something on the beach. the water, the horizon and husband's silhouette seemed like the perfect subject matter for my first attempt.

it took me awhile, but i stitched up all my lines and then it was time to add watercolors. me being a sucker for non-fiction, i didn't intend to stray too much from the colors of the water and the photo as it was. it did end up a bit bluer than my photo, but that had more to do with my color-mixing abilities than with what i actually wanted to do. i clearly need some practice to achieve the colors i want.

i love the notion of combining my many photographs with paint and stitches and i want to explore this technique further. i think it will push both my photography and my stitching, not to mention my painting skills. it feels like anne was able to open a door to a whole new world of possibility for me.

longtime readers of my blog or those of you who know me in real life, may have noticed that i'm not the most patient person in the world. both stitching and working with watercolors on handmade paper require patience. patience that is difficult for me. i was actually fine on the stitching part and even achieved that meditative state (when i wasn't philosophizing on the intersection between art and craft) that i can't seem to achieve in actual meditation. stitching the black lines helped me clear my mind of extraneous, racing thoughts and i was just there, in the moment, stitching. it was wonderful and relaxing.

in places, my watercolors were too wet and they bled through my stitched lines. unfortunately, right there where  it made it look a bit like husband had had a little accident. happily, on the second day, anne showed me how to fix that with some pastel pencils that i brought along, so it wasn't the tragedy it seemed at first.

i still haven't fully processed the experience - it was two days and they absolutely flew by. we drank tea and discussed art and artists. we talked about how giving and open anne was with her techniques and how even tho' they were unique and "secret," in passing them along to others, she didn't diminish what she herself was doing with them. the three of us who attended each achieved something very different with our individual applications of the techniques (i'll show photos of that in another post). for each of us, it was quite unlike what anne was doing and somehow reflected our own personalities and preoccupations. it made me think that there needs to be a whole lot less fear about sharing out there in the art world.

here's my finished product. we backed our delicate works with interfacing, to make them a bit more sturdy and i'm going to find a frame for it and hang it here near my desk, to remind me of husband when he's not around and of an inspirational weekend where i began the next chapter in my personal creativity.

i'm already started on the next one, using one of my many shots of the field across from our house. i can't wait to get stitching.

the second photo in this post is one of anne's works, where she used this technique on a photo of obelisks on a beach in bretagne. she takes to the level of art, don't you think?

more on the other techniques i learned and what my fellow students (including elizabeth) made in another post.