danish weaver hanne vedel

the amazing danish weaver hanne vedel, who is 94 and still weaving, held an open house during the autumn holiday last week. we went to visit her. she was taught to weave by cis fink, one of the classic old danish weaving teachers who originally owned my loom. this photo above is of hanne vedel on the left and emmy, my personal weaving teacher and the one who gave me my loom, which once belonged to cis fink. i feel so privileged to have met hanne vedel and even more privileged to own a loom with such history. 

hanne vedel is one of the most prolific and famous danish weavers of the 20th century. this is a bolt of cloth that she wove for the curtains for the upgrade of the trustee council chamber (also known here in denmark as the finn juhl chamber) at the UN building in new york. so simple, but so beautiful. 

we spent nearly two hours at her studio, just looking at everything and being inspired. this wall hanging gave me an idea for some weavings that i want to do for our home (more about that in another post soon).

i need to weave some long panels for a steeply vaulted wall above our stairs and i've been pondering how we could fix them to the wall so that they don't sag. this might be a way to approach it. 

this work looked different, depending on the angle you stood in relation to it. i'm not sure my project will be able to do that because you can never get up high enough to look at it from the one angle, but it was inspiring nonetheless.

i sent husband past her studio on the monday after our visit, so that he could look at the frame this piece was mounted on. now i just have to figure out my version. 

hanne vedel is still actively weaving. she had projects set up on two looms. this one, involving horse hair, was also super inspiring. i have so many ideas now and not enough time or enough looms to execute them all!

now i just need to find someone with a horse that wants to trim its mane or tail. 

look how lovely that it is! simple but beautiful.

hanne vedel had run spinderigaard, a spinnery, for many years and so i scored some lovely wool and silk cones. it's enough to make a lovely scarf or something. i love those greenish speckles. i got some with black speckles as well. 

 

a first look at stitched journeys

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.  

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. 

catching up

my current wips. i haven't knitted all summer. summer weather just isn't really the vibe for knitting. but i went to the knitting group on tuesday and got some help with two of the projects (the yellow vest) and the loosely-woven white shawl/swimsuit cover-up. the weather is turning a bit cooler, though we've had a lovely indian summer of late, and so it feels like knitting time again.

the child and her good friend headed off to lisbon on tuesday. school starts next week. she sent me a load of pictures today from their exploration of the city. we were going to accompany them down there, but husband has a big audit at work next week, and so the timing wasn't good. we decided we'll go in november when it's rainy and dark here and the girls are settled in. 

we had a lot of fun with the girls - roping them in to helping at the harvest market at the museum (we took a little break in the new kro stue here). we did puzzles and played cards and explored the area and ate some good food and drank some wine and watched real housewives. it was all quite relaxed and chill and just what we needed.

i joined noma's coffee club and i fear i will never be the same. that buku sayisa is absolutely incredible. we haven't tried the chelchele yet. we're trying to savor it. husband is also crazy for it. it isn't cheap, but we've decided we're worth it. life truly is too short for crap coffee.

i've started on my next set of taylor swift tea towels. i'm doing speak now this time, as i had all the colors and they work perfectly for the setup i want to play with this time. i've only just started - i'm still trying out all of the colors in a section at the start, to get acquainted. i found a mistake and managed to fix it. the loom never lies, it shows you everything. 

i think i'm coming down with the first cold of the season. my throat is sore and i'm achy in my shoulders. it seems like the change of season is always accompanied by a bug. it's no doubt also a result of slowing down after running around for several weeks. and of staying up half the night, watching the news of charlie kirk being shot. i'd like to say i have mixed feelings about that, but i honestly don't. these people don't face the consequences of their toxicity very often. i wonder if we won't look back and realize that the civil war had already begun.

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i really loved reading this piece about books. 

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?