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. 

color inspiration

i'm setting up a warp with colors inspired by these colors of kindness crayons as the first thing i will weave on the new loom. i want to not only get to know it, but also experiment with color and how it works together. plus, everyone is clearly getting tea towels for christmas!

if you need me, i'll be playing with these and planning the color scheme this weekend. 
 

what is time?

i participated in another project at trapholt museum. they are amazing at doing these projects where they involve ordinary people like me. they always involve some kind of craft - embroidery, weaving, patchwork, knitting. they often ask a young designer/artist to put the whole thing together. and the projects are always awesome to be part of. this time, the theme is time. the mission was to find a single word that means time to you. then, you should embroider that word on a piece of old bed linens. the bed linens were allowed to have holes in them, which you repaired using sashiko stitching and you had to embroider the word in blue embroidery thread. you also had to track your time and embroider how much you spent in white thread. i found a lovely old dyne cover in a nearby secondhand shop, but it didn't have any stains or holes to repair. my piece is 57cm long, because i'm 57 years old. all of them had to be 50cm wide. oh, and you had to embroider a line down the middle in a simple running stitch.

it took me a long time to figure out my word. i mean, really, what one word expresses time if you can't use the word time? i kept coming back to stories. it struck me that we can't even talk about time without telling a story. it never settled in for me a the word that i KNEW i had to have, but i also couldn't get it out of my head, so i ended up choosing it.

another of the rules was that you could use whatever embroidery stitches you wanted, but you couldn't stitch anything figurative. you really had to just stitch your word. and it had to be at least 6cm tall. i had trouble making my word behave as i wanted - i wanted it in my handwriting and in the end, i formed the word from a thin wire and stitched over it to achieve what i was looking for. 

and because the wire would have been against the rules, i picked it all out again after i had stitched over it. the whole stitching process took me 16 hours and 22 minutes. the thinking about it took much longer than that. i don't think what i made is high art by itself. i'm so curious how the final work, put together by artist kristine mandsbjerg will turn out. i'll keep you posted. the exhibition goes up in november.

what word would you have chosen?

the brewery is now a weaving studio

my friend's husband died in february and she has sold her house in the countryside and bought a new apartment. that means that it was time for her loom to come home to me. we decided that the beautiful new floor in the brewery made it a perfect room for it, so now it's not a brewery, but a weaving studio! on saturday, we dismantled it and brought it over to our place.

husband is going to build some shelves and storage areas for all those sticks. weaving requires a lot of sticks. 

i also got that beautiful piece of olmer cloth that's hanging over the chair from emmy. i'm going to use it to make a new cover for the pillow that's underneath all those sticks in the previous picture. the one i'm using there belongs in our outdoor lounge area. 

i wanted to assemble it immediately, but we had to go back over to have dinner and sit around the fire and make pancakes for dessert. it was absolutely glorious weather all of the long weekend. i do love the many spring holidays in denmark.

husband and i waited until monday to assemble it, since we had guests over for a barbeque on sunday. we had it assembled in no time. it's actually not that difficult, even though it looks quite complicated. of course, it helped that we had just disassembled it the day before.

we glued some felt on the bottom of the legs to protect the floor, hence the newspaper. i'm going to make a colorful warp and do some tea towels to get acquainted with it. then, i will embark on rugs for our bedroom. i've waited for this moment for more than a decade - my own loom, set up so that i can weave at home!

marching in under the wire

i almost let march go without writing here. not sure how that happened. time flies when you're having fun! over my birthday weekend, we had so much fun, creating an amazing floor in our brewery. here are the photos of it. it's a decorative polyurethane floor. which is related to, but not epoxy. it wears better and looks amazing! what do you think?

writing maps: on language

i follow the writing maps account on instagram and i've even ordered a few of their writing maps. i'm sick today and have stayed home from work. i've got a fever and that ache in the shoulders that comes with the flu. so i'm sitting in bed, propped up with pillows and my laptop and i thought i'd use one as a prompt. 

- - -

being from south dakota, second languages weren't really the norm. in the era i graduated from high school (1985), a second language wasn't even a requirement, though a requirement was passed around then, so my sister, who graduated in 1991, had to take german in high school. i didn't even have the option, so it was only english for me.

when i got to south dakota state for my freshman year, i signed up for french with a little near-sighted woman with a white bob called madame redhead (rather a misnomer with her white hair) to fulfill my language requirement. i wasn't a natural language-learner and i always felt rather silly trying to speak it.

then i moved to california and took a russian class at fullerton community college. i was interested in russian thanks to my deep and abiding loathing of ronald reagan. my teacher, tatiana gale, was a russian emigré with shockingly purpley-red hair that i later came to know as russian red (it comes straight from a bottle). i dedicated myself to learning the cyrillic alphabet and even decided to go back to university and major in russian after tatiana, with her late 80s new age vibe, told me that she had a feeling that i should do something with russian. being 19 and looking for guidance, i jumped on that advice wholeheartedly.

like the french, learning russian didn't come easily to me - i suppose i missed the language-learning window in my brain, not being exposed to any other languages when i was younger. but i had much more motivation for russian and fell in love with the literature, so i persevered through my bachelor's degree, a master's and well into ph.d. studies. adding a summer course in serbo-croatian (as they still called it in the early days after the dissolution of yugoslavia) and macedonian and even getting that fateful fulbright to macedonia that meant meeting husband in skopje.

and meeting him meant adding yet another language, that has ended up my second most fluent language today - danish. and through danish, i can read (if not entirely understand) swedish and norwegian and a surprising amount of german, if i can't actually speak those languages. 

the prompt asked about family languages - my parents only spoke english, though dad remembered his grandmother who more or less spoke only german. that must mean that emil, my grandfather, also spoke german, though he died when my dad was 16, so i never knew him. his father julius and mother frederikke, had come over from a little town near koenigsberg in east prussia and settled on the prairies, though if i remember correctly, emil was born after they got to south dakota. they surely kept speaking their native german together for the rest of their lives. 

my grandmothers, to my knowledge, only spoke english as well - i never heard of them having any knowledge of another language. their stock was sabins and barnhardts, which i oddly know less about than the nachtigals. funny how one strong branch of the family sticks out and becomes the dominant one.

i don't necessarily know how this informs the stories i write or will write, but it surely informs who i am, or at least the foundation of who i am. i definitely feel like i don't have the full spectrum of my personality when i speak danish. who i am at my core, is who i am in english. 

i'm happy to have raised my child with more or less two native languages - as i always spoke english with her and her father (and the school system), always spoke danish. she had some german as well in school here in denmark, though, like me and french, she didn't really take to it. 

when she first went to the US, she had a bit of a danish accent, but after 5 years there, that's gone. i doubt my accent in danish will ever disappear and i'll never get the hang of those danish articles (et/en), but i'm happy that she inherited her father's language ability and not mine. 

25 years together!

 25 years ago today - brønshøj kirke

and today - only a little bit older. 

he's still a keeper

here's to 25 more.