rage making

my old bloggy friend bill sent me this beautiful piece on rage making by sarah kendzior. she seems to have been able to put voice to what i've been feeling and doing — directing so much of my attention and time to threads and making, in the face of feeling helpless to stop the madness my fellow countrymen are wreaking and have wrought in electing a senile spray-tanned wanna-be king. 

there are so many parallels in my own weaving story to hers. i too got my loom from a wonderful 80-year-old woman who is teaching me to weave. we are both searching for meaning and something tangible and beautiful in the threads. 

i am enthralled with the threads themselves...i love the process of setting up the loom - i love using the slay hook (just learned that term from sarah, it's called a rittenål in danish and i am learning this craft in danish). i love that every single individual thread passes through my hands countless times before becoming a whole piece of cloth. sarah seems a bit more frustrated by that, wanting to get on to the making part. but i love the time the process takes and i love getting to know each and every thread.

people keep asking me how long it takes to make a tea towel. once everything is all set up, i can weave one towel in about 2 hours. but the last batch of 11 took me a total of 46 hours from when we began to make the warp to when i hemmed and ironed the last one. there's no way to put a price on them that would compensate me for that work. but the work is priceless to me in terms of keeping me balanced and sane. 

i love that this craft is being passed down to me by a woman who learned it properly back in the day and who wove many beautiful things on the loom that now stands in my home. she got the loom from one of the early, famous danish weaving teachers of the 20th century, cis fink, who also wove countless beautiful things on it before it became emmy's. and now it's mine. i wish it could tell me tales of all the threads its seen and known and held. sitting at it, turning threads into cloth, feels like joining that long tradition and line of women who came before me. it feels wholesome and good and odin knows we need that feeling more than ever today. 

while the need to create something tangible and beautiful and useful from mere threads is driven by a need to escape from a world gone mad, surely it's also healing somehow. repairing the tears in our existence, creating something beautiful that i can hold in my hands and give to friends as gifts. i feel joy every time i dry a dish in the kitchen with the beautiful rainbow towel i made. and i feel so happy when i gift one to a friend and they tell me later how much they enjoy using it. maybe those small joys will help us through this and it will all be ok in the end. 

going on about yarn again...

this is fast becoming a fiber blog. but that's what's been consuming me of late and so since it's always been mostly for me (sorry, but that's true), i'm recording my progress here. since i last shared knitting 10 days ago, i've finished my sophie hood. i love it. it's so soft and warm. and our weather is still chilly, so i finished it in time to use it this winter. also, how cool are my new glasses?

i also started two new sophie scarves. one is brown and i think i'll send it to my sister.

and one is dark green with sparkles in it. i couldn't resist that yarn. and it was marked down at one of the three lovely yarn shops that are within about 15 minutes from our place. that's both nice and a bit dangerous, since i find myself thinking about yarn all the time.

i'm almost to the point where i will get to start the colorwork on my kastali sweater. i like this red and it's been very relaxing getting this knitted up. 

i knitted quite a lot more on the brown sophie scarf on the way to copenhagen yesterday, but it's too dark to take a photo of my progress this evening and i strangely neglected to photograph it yesterday. 

and i can't resist leaving you with this photo i took the other day of all the things i've completed so far. one sweater, four sophie scarves and my sophie hood. all by petite knit. people on tiktok like to hate on her (why are women so hard on one another?), but i think her patterns are awesome and she's definitely helped me become a knitter. 

turning threads into fabric

i turned this... 

into this...

and all clipped apart, hemmed and finished, they look like this...

and here's a closer look at a few of my favorites...the first one, i'm keeping for myself from this batch.  

this has the classic look that karoline wanted.

i'm loving the madras plaid vibe of this one. i did a few variants of it.

i ordered up a bunch of new colors from a new source in sweden and i'm going to do some that are inspired by taylor swift eras. it will be a fun exercise in playing with color even more!

and on my needles

 

at the end of march last year i got my first real knitting lesson from my friend emily. i didn't finish that sweater (the novice sweater by petite knit) until late in 2024, but since then, i've been rather actively knitting and getting a bit more adventurous. 

i've finished four sophie scarves by petite knit - two long and two of the shorter version. they're a nice project to have on the needles for taking on the go. i've got a couple more queued up and i just have to cast one on again. i'm thinking the next one will be brown. 

back in november, i bought all this luscious yarn to make the holly sweater by knitting for olive. my friend emily, who taught me to knit, is making it too. we both wanted to finish by christmas, but that didn't happen. for me, it's because i encountered the berries, which seemed a little advanced for my level of knitting. i think for emily, she just ran into a knitting dry spell and hasn't felt like working on it. 

but thanks to the wonderful, experienced knitting ladies at my tuesday evening knitting group at our local museum, i have now learned how to make both german short rows and the berries (turns out it wasn't really that difficult) and am well on my way again. it will for sure be done in time for next christmas. 

and then last friday, i decided on the spur of the moment that i had to make a sweater that i saw in the window of a knitting store in a nearby town. it's icelandic wool and an icelandic pattern called the kastali sweater. it's supposed to be a cropped sweater, but i bought extra wool to knit it a bit longer. i'm already well on my way - this one is knitting from the bottom up, which is my first time trying that.

i'm even further than in this picture - it's quite easy to just knit in one color while watching t.v. in the evening. and much nicer than doom scrolling on my phone. i would actually never have imagined that i would be good enough at knitting to be able to knit and watch t.v. at the same time. i'm still a timid knitter, but my skills are coming along and i am getting braver. 

and lastly, the end is in sight on my sophie hood, also by petite knit. i'm so glad i went back for the last ball of yarn, because i definitely wouldn't have had enough. it's kamelia by permin and it was in a sale basket at my local yarn store. when i first started, it nagged at me that i might not have enough yarn and so i went back and got one more. good thing i did! it's so soft and i can't wait to wear it. i hope to finish it and block it this weekend. 

i'm currently trying to leave all meta platforms because i finally realized how evil those running them are and i don't want to give them any more of my attention, but you can find me and my knitting projects on good old ravelry. and i hope to be back here a bit more regularly now too. plus, i might actually start posting in earnest on substack. 

on the loom right now

i'm making another set of tea towels at the moment - these were colors chosen by husband's eldest for her kitchen in her new apartment. 

she wanted blue, green and brown and we also spiced things up with some accents in orange and tomato red, as well as a neutral, undyed thread. 

 i've finished 7 of 10 so far. i like the ones best that are ending up plaid. 

of course, i get quite a lot of "help" from mazikeen.  

 oh, and on the little loom, i've just prepared all the fabric to get started on that new rug for the kitchen.

draw together 2025

i'm doing wendy mac's draw together on substack. i started it last year as well, but didn't get very far. i'm already a little bit behind (i've been sick this week), but here's how it's going so far...

day 1 - thinking about what i want more and less of in 2025.

it's a great opportunity to use my new japanese watercolors. they're more opaque than normal ones, which is fun to play with.

i'm using this year's munken agenda as the notebook - it's part calendar and part notebook and this year's seems especially suited to art journaling.

i liked this swirl exercise - the idea was to start on the outside and go in and on the inside and go out. my inside out, i continued and did a second outside in. it was unexpectedly soothing and relaxing.

day 3, the assignment was making lots of little connected circles. that was also soothing. i liked that it was the assignment on this page of the calendar, which had a colorful background already.

i think this grid exercise shows my growing interest in weaving.

this one, we had to make a doodle and then color in some of it, using only two colors. every exercise is only 10 minutes and then you have to stop. you should be left wanting more. and that's been the case on every exercise so far.

this one, we had to tape off a grid and make some backgrounds. it's here i got to use my new japanese watercolors. and it took more than 10 minutes because i had to wait for it to dry.

then we had to paint some of the shapes from the previous day's exercise in the squares. can you see the ones i tried to copy? alas, the tape ripped off some of the paper when i took it off. that made me a little sad. i wouldn't have thought washi tape would do that.

as i said, i'm a little behind, so more soon, it's the 10th, so i get to do four exercises today!

weaving lately

 

the first set of rainbow tea towels were so much fun, i made a second batch of them! they make me so happy. i might even have to have a third round! though i want to make some bath towels and two scarves first. here's the colors i bought for the bath towels. they'll be in a waffle weave, so they should be good for toweling off after the shower. 

and a few more shades for the weft.

and this is the wool i got for the scarves i want to make.

and when we went to latvia in october, i bought some green wool for a rug for the bedroom at the market.

on the little loom, i've set up a warp for making rag rugs. then i came into some wool leftovers from a carpet factory and i'm now experimenting with those. weaving with wool is new to me. i'm making a small rug for the guest bedroom.

i got almost halfway on the weekend. keeping it simple. i have four shades of blue and i got some neon yellow for the stripes. i'm doing the walls in that room in light blue and i'll have some neon yellow accents - like an old wardrobe that i intend to paint neon yellow. light blue and neon yellow look surprisingly good together. 

before this, i did a small colorful rag rug using two duvet covers that i found. i made it as long as it could be with the fabric i had. it's about 180cm and will be perfect for the entryway by the back door.

i think i'll clip these both off the loom when i'm done with the wool one. i've got 16 meters of warp, so i can continue once these are clipped.  i also have fabric to make a new runner for the kitchen to replace the one i dropped a new bottle of olive oil on right after i made it. but i have plenty of warp for that. and maybe a couple more. i've been gathering old duvet covers in nice colors in the secondhand stores. it's so nice to give old textiles a new life.

oh, and it's not weaving, but i also finished my very first knitted sweater! it's the novice sweater in chunky by petite knit, using yarn that i had. it's not perfect, but i'm very happy that i knitted a sweater! i've already started another.