indigo dye pot

this indigo dying is another of those things that i never did until i learned to do it in danish, so i don't actually know what this is called. in danish it's a kypefarve. from what i can find online, it's called a starter solution - and it involves lye and powdered indigo and needs a few days to "marinate" before using it. 

you bring the water up to between 50-55°C and then gently add the starter solution. then a kind of shiny, iridescent surface forms. and then you can start dyeing.

we started off with some of the lovely mohair yarn we got from our recent visit to a mohair goat farm on fyn. 

we included a little bag of curly mohair locks. 

you can see some of the magic happening in this shot - it's a lovely green when you lift it out of the water and as it reacts with the air, it gets more and more blue. i absolutely love the alchemy of it and it's so magical that it comes from a plant!

this is my indigo bed. we didn't use fresh indigo for this. i want to learn to extract and make the indigo powder out of my fresh indigo. you can see what i did with the fresh stuff last year - here and here.

i also had some white linen napkins that i bought and they went into the pot as well - here you can really see the green color they have before the air does its magic. 

this is how the mohair yarn turned out. we could probably have left it in the pot longer and gotten an even darker blue, but i think this is just lovely!

and here's how the mohair locks turned out. we'll use all this yarn and such in our weaving projects at the museum. i have one more project to show in one last post, so stay tuned for more goodness from the indigo pot. 

linen dress in the indigo dye pot

i got this white linen dress on sale at cos last year. i've been waiting for the chance to dip it in an indigo dye pot for nearly a year! well, i got the chance last weekend! so i did a bit of prep on it with some fun shibori techniques. i put marbles inside and tied them with rubberbands. 

 my plan is to dip only part of the dress in the indigo and leave part of it white. 

and this is how i dipped it. i love the magic of indigo. it looks so green until it hits the air and then it magically turns blue (more about the indigo pot in my next post). 

how the marble bundles turned out - i love it! i'm really pleased with how it turned out.

i feel like i dipped it just the right amount. and i'm happy we've had a few warm days of indian summer, so that i could wear it in the past week.

and the back. maybe i could have dipped it a little bit more in the back. it has a belt too that i also dipped, but strangely, i failed to photograph that. i want to do lots of more of this!

chaos theory

back in late summer and autumn of 2020, i wove this rag rug for my kitchen.

it was the second one that i made. i needed to make a second one after breaking a full, new bottle of olive oil on my first one.

looking back at these photos, i can't see anything wrong with the warp, but later, it would become evident that something was indeed wrong with it. it retained some kind of sensitivity to initial conditions which would later prove to cause significantly different future behavior (e.g. chaos theory).

it's never a good thing to try to calculate all the hours you've spent on a woven work, but it was lot. the cloth all came from old sheets and duvet covers that i collected at second hand stores over several months. and i ripped them all up and then reordered them neatly between the threads, making them into something new.

and here it was, all finished and freshly off the loom in late november 2020.

it looked great in my kitchen and i used it happily for more than a year.

last summer, husband rolled it up when he was sweeping the kitchen floor and it sat out in the back terrace for a few weeks and may have become a cat bed for a time. in february, i decided to take it in to a laundromat that has an extra big washing machine, and give it a good wash.

and even before i washed it, i noticed that some of the threads had broken and that was even more evident when it came out of the machine. and now, we've hung it on the wall down at the museum. we think there was something wrong with the linen yarn we used, as it's all along one side where it basically dissolved. at first i thought it was moths, but they don't attack linen, only wool and there was none of the telltale evidence they leave behind. there is some kind of beauty in the way it fell apart. it transformed it somehow from a useful object to an art object - now symbolizing some kind of decay and the tendency of all things to move from order to chaos. and there is beauty in that. 

green-eyed monster at the white palace

if these walls could talk. can you imagine what they would say? i can. or at least i would like to try. there were too many people around for me to hear their whispers. but how i longed to. 

look at that crown. it's the white palace's crown. or rather, an old fancy oven that used to heat the room. i fairly swooned just seeing it. 

and there was a not-quite dead piano. i love me a dead piano ever since photographing one in an old mansion along the volga river ever so long ago. 

i almost forgot to look at the art, and in all honestly, it wasn't really that interesting. what was interesting were the bones of this house. i'm not generally an envious person, but damn, did i feel regret that we didn't try to buy this place when it was for sale. it would have been a house worthy of a never-ending house project. 

just look at those bannisters! they had removed any way up to them, but i found myself wanting to find a way to climb up and look around. three stories, four including the basement below. and yes, it's just the bare walls, but oh, what walls they are.

this brick floor. and the possibilities. and again, the stories it could tell. i am so jealous of the young couple who owns it. they live in another little house on the property, as obviously, this isn't liveable and will take a monumental amount of work and money to fix, but still. 

that piano again. sigh. at the very least, our weaving group must do an exhibition here. i can see long, gauzy, colorful swaths of woven fabric draping those walls. now that is art that would be worthy of the space. but oh, how i would love to be the one to fix it up and live there. if only to commune with the ghosts that must be there. maybe they're even tickling the keys of that piano now, as night falls, after all the excitement of all those people walking through today. 

stitched stories

this is the text i wrote to go with the exhibition of my great grandmother's quilts.

these quilts and quilt tops were made by annie barnhart (1863-1946) of salem, south dakota. she was my maternal great-grandmother. i think she would be amazed to know that her rather prolific handiwork found its way to denmark with her great-granddaughter. 

 

my mother told a story from her childhood, of her grandmother, ill and bound to her bed at her daughter’s home in sergeant bluff, iowa, sewing away on these quilts. she had stacks of squares of different colors and she just spent her days, sewing them together. mom even said her eyesight wasn’t so great anymore, so the color combinations and the designs are even more amazing considering that fact. and i can’t even begin to count the number of hours that went into them. 

mom was born in 1939 and if her grandmother died in 1946, she must have been a small girl. she told me that she got to help do some of the stitching, so she had very fond memories of her grandmother working on them. i’m so glad that i know that and that she shared it before she lost those memories to alzheimer’s in her later years. 

i look at these quilts and i think of all the memories that are stitched into them that i don’t have access to. the stories behind all the old dresses and flour sacks that were cut into squares and sewn together by hand. some of the fabrics are surely 100 years old. i wish they could talk and tell of the occasions they were worn to – dances, parties, church, everyday life. i wish i could access those stories. 

sometimes, i feel like if i sit very still and i’m quiet enough, i will be able to hear them whisper their stories to me. i think one of the magical things about quilts is that they are very representative of their times – the fabrics used, the way they are stitched. they are quite literally the very fabric of their time. and they tell us a story even if we can’t necessarily hear the stories they tell. 

i feel privileged to share them all with you in this very magical place, across an ocean and a world away from where they were made. i hope that great grandmother annie is looking down and smiling. 

and i hope she likes the small mini-quilts that i made, using fabrics gifted to me by two friends, each with their own stories – mini quilts that i feel are a dialogue between me and those amazing women, continuing the tradition of telling stories through quilting in our family.

what would great grandma think?

i have a stack of quilt tops that my great grandmother made. mom said she could remember, as a little girl, seeing her bed-bound grandmother, who didn't see all that well, sitting in bed, sewing squares together by hand. it's absolutely amazing to me that she could do it and keep the pattern of the squares perfectly if she wasn't able to lay it all out on a table or a wall or the floor. when i lay out a quilt, i have to see it, photograph it, walk away, move things around, do it all over again. but she could sit in bed, sewing away and make the most beautiful quilts. i'm so pleased to display them at my favorite little museum in connection the what we call "handicrafts days" at the end of the month. i wonder what my great grandmother from salem, south dakota would think of her quilts being in denmark, displayed in a rather alternative way - one that invites people to touch them and look closely. though i never knew her, i think she'd love it. and oh the stories her stitches would tell us if only we could hear them.

dataspejlet :: weaving community

i spent the weekend at the loom. our weaving group is part of an art project at trapholt museum. fiber artist astrid skibsted is working with trapholt on a project called dataspejlet. it's in two parts - one is woven and one is embroidered (i'll write more about it in another post). for the woven part, our weaving group was chosen to participate. we received all the yarn we needed in colors that were chosen for us and a warp that was ready to put on the loom. when i arrived at the museum on saturday, it was already nearly ready to start weaving. 

it's strange in a way to write about weaving, as it's something i learned in danish and therefore, i don't really know the terminology in english. so i don't know how to express the part of threading it and putting it into the comb. and on some level, i don't really want to even google it, as it's something that danish and i have together.  i realize it makes me sound like even more of a beginner than i even am (and after ten years, i still feel like a beginner), but that's just how it is. 

the last thing that needed doing was the fishing line along the sides. it's there for stability, but plastic fishing line is very different than the linen threads beside it, so we struggled a bit to get it right. luckily, there's a facebook group where everyone who is part of the weaving is helping one another and we learned that we needed more weight on the fishing line at the other end.  but on saturday, we didn't know that and we struggled with the fishing line and keeping it taut so it would lay nicely on the edge.

we were given a cream colored yarn to use as a test section. it's this very cool japanese yarn that's actually flat, rather than round. and it takes working with it a bit to get it right. and that fishing line teased us.

but on sunday, after following advice from others in the group, we put on more weight and we got weaving in earnest. our edges looked beautiful and i got to weave the whole first section. the whole pattern is prescribed and since we are quite a large group, everyone needs to have a chance. i did a small timelapse of my weaving. my phone was fastened to the loom and it slowly turned over the course of the timelapse.

as always, i feel like the loom teaches me lessons that i can't learn anywhere else. it's the most honest thing - you can't trick it or fool it or hide anything. it will show clearly any tricks you try to pull on it. it will always be totally honest with you - and show you clearly your mistakes. but when you correct them, it will also show you all its beauty. and when it does, there's really nothing like it. tiny threads, woven together, become something strong and beautiful. it rather takes my breath away. and to be part of a larger work that is the work of so many others gives a real sense of community. even solving frustrating problems is part of the story that we're weaving into the work and it will all be there in the threads when it's done. what a privilege to be part of it.

lessons learned at the loom

these photos represent three months of work. at the end of july, i began winding a warp in linen. i had chosen what are arguably swedish colors - two shades of blue, yellow and white. the stripes came out rather organically, i would listen to my intuition and then switch colors, creating some stripes wide and some thin, as the mood struck. we decided to call it julie's crazy stripes. 

as you may know, i weave at a little museum about 30km away from home. it's one of those places that have a kind of magic that's hard to explain. you just have to feel it. and you can feel it instantly when you step out of the car. you feel your shoulders relax and you breathe more deeply. 

i haven't done the project alone. the weaving group meets every wednesday and i can't always get there, thanks to being busy at work, so another person wound the warp onto the loom and threaded it through the heddles and prepared it. i got to do a little bit of this, so i learned about it as well, but it was mostly done by one of the other sweet old ladies.

the loom is from 1913 and i like to sit there and imagine all of the cloth that has been created on it. but it also means that she is a bit of a temperamental old thing and she needs getting used to. and yes, i think she's a she. though i'm not sure i can explain why. i just get a feminine impression when i sit at her. and lest you think all looms must be female, the one i wove my rag rugs on is definitely a boy. a young boy. 

there were multiple frustrations, because someone else set it up in my absence, it wasn't until i sat down and had woven 5-6cm that i discovered that there were a number of mistakes that needed to be fixed. that was frustrating and i'd be lying if i didn't admit that i had to take a deep breath and remind myself that i could just as easily have made the mistakes. threading 400+ thin threads through the heddles and the comb isn't an easy job and if you're interrupted, it's very easy to make a mistake.

but what you can't do is hide from that mistake. it shows itself very clearly and very quickly. a loom is an honest thing - it gives you what asked for and nothing more. so if you didn't set it up correctly, that will very quickly become evident. there's no fudging and no covering it up and just going on. mistakes are clear and obvious and it's best to just admit them and fix them before you move on. there's a life lesson in that, i'm sure. 

so we stopped, and we redid a whole lot. and i say we because i'm very grateful for the wise, experienced women at the museum, because they know how to fix such mistakes and they patiently show me how and help me. and i couldn't do any of it without them. and it's such a good lesson for me - asking for help. why is that so hard? why do we think we have to be perfect on the first try? why don't we give ourselves room to make mistakes and learn and grow? 

above all, this wise old loom teaches me patience. she's steady and predictable when you get to know her, but she doesn't hide anything - least of all my mistakes. she shows them to me clearly and she offers me the choice of living with them or undoing them and starting over. over the course of weaving these four linen tea towels, i have made both choices. i had a section of about 10-12cm that was so full of mistakes that i couldn't live with it. nor could i bear the idea of the time it would take to pull it all out. so i fixed what was wrong with the warp and then started anew. and i have that section of cloth and i'm going to make a pincushion or two of it, to remind me that even my mistakes can be useful. that feels like a powerful lesson. and i'm not even sure that i can fully appreciate it, but i'm going to try. 

elsewhere, there are small mistakes. a time or two when a single thread or two was a bit loose and so the thread got sent through on the wrong side with the shuttle. those i can live with. they can contribute to the charm of the piece. to show that it's handmade and that imperfections have their own beauty. that it was made by a fallible human and not a machine. 

and today, i finally dared to cut them apart. it feels like such an act of violence. i sewed a zigzag on the sewing machine on both sides along the places i was going to cut, so they wouldn't unravel and i wove a ribbon to serve as the straps for the towels. it was hard to cut that ribbon up as well. i spent so much time making sure every thread was right, that it felt like a violation to cut them up. but it also felt good. i sewed a hem on each end and i attached my handwoven ribbon. and it was satisfying. 

and now, they're soaking overnight in an enamel bowl of cold water. i will wash them tomorrow and that will bring them together into the soft, usable, absorbent tea towels they will become. and then i will let them dry and i will wrap them up and give them as gifts to two people special to me. and it will all have been worth three months of work and all of the lessons learned at the loom. 

looking for the elusive red thread

we got together in our local creative group on sunday and made small "flexigon" books together, inspired by places that mean something to us. because i love the little museum down in randbøldal, where i go to weaving every other wednesday, i wanted to make that the focus of my little foldable book. i selected some photos that i'd taken there, as well as a photo of the runner for my kitchen that i wove there at the museum. many of the photos i chose were of that work in progress and the one in the middle is of the new runner that i just started last saturday. what i wanted to ponder in my little book was the magic of the place. because it really is a magical place. 

and what came out was something else entirely. i began to think about the way that we trace red threads of meaning through our lives. or the way that we probably should do that and don't always do so. and my little book became a kind of meditation on that. perhaps because i have used red strips cloth in my rug, or because i often struggle to figure out whether there is a cohesive meaning to my life. it can feel like i'm really just bumbling along. 

but it's strange that wasn't what i sat down to create. i wanted to create a little book that expressed the magic i feel in the air when i'm at the museum. it's a really special place. it makes me feel calm and centered and present. i feel it immediately when i step out of my car, my shoulders relax and i breathe deeply. it's in a little valley, on the curve of a creek, nestled down in the trees. part of the magic is the group of women which gathers there, especially the leader of that group, who is a lovely, spry, can-do woman who makes things happen. she's a big part of the magic. but the place itself has something special as well. maybe it's on just the right vortex, or just the way it's placed, there on the creek, nestled at the base of a tree-covered hill, is perfect. and i wanted to try to capture that in my little book, but instead, it ended as a search for a red thread. 

i guess i unconsciously chose that myself when i chose the pictures that i did. i have many other pictures that capture the magic, but the ones i chose were nearly all of my own weaving and in that way, i guess i did control the direction it took, even if it maybe felt like i didn't. i guess i'm just looking for that elusive red thread.