thank you, molly!

this week, i stopped by a random stranger's house, which is near my work in aarhus, to pick up a little parcel from my bloggy friend molly. it's a small world. a friend in south africa who i've never met in person, but who feels like one of my oldest friends, 🫶 sends an envelope for me with someone she's working with who happens to live in denmark. and it totally brightened my day in this dark time of year. it's a lovely blank book, a sticker, some tags, a cool capetown patch and a notebook that can stick to the refrigerator. i will smile and think of molly every time i see these things and use them. and i will be grateful all over again for this space and the whole bloggy universe, even if it isn't what it once was. i hope this friend of molly's work will take her back to capetown so i can return the favor. and if that's the case, molly, i hope you like taylor swift tea towels. 😘

this week in seven senses

i enjoy reading the seven senses substack. the seven senses are the ones that come to mind - see, hear, taste, touch, smell, plus two that are a little more thought-provoking - balance and envision. i decided to try my hand at noting down something from those 7 senses that i experienced this week. it seems like a noble exercise. 

see

i stopped by arken, a modern art museum south of copenhagen. i wanted to see this  lærke bagger popup. lærke bagger is a famous danish knitter who has written two books that are part knitting pattern book and part autobiography. the sweaters in the photo are her "inner child" sweater, knitted by people all over denmark (and probably the world). each knitted with their own colors and their own stories. i didn't knit one (yet), but i'm impressed by those who did. anytime you gather a bunch of similar things together, it's impressive. there are so many stories there in those fibers, you could feel the energy of them all in the room. 

there was another exhibition there by an artist called kenneth rasmussen. he has a manic need to knit plastic bags and it resulted in this amazing installation. doing your obsession in a huge quantity can really turn into something. that's quite reassuring to a person who has currently made it her mission to weave all of taylor swift's albums as tea towels. 

hear

what i'm listening to is a bit mainstream, but that's just how it is. i can't get enough of taylor swift's life of a showgirl. i listen on repeat and i play the songs in order and i don't skip any. my current favorite is elizabeth taylor. but i also really like opalite. i feel like i'm officially a real swiftie now and this one will be my album. i can't wait to weave it.

taste

i made this yuzu curd for some cupcakes i took to a gathering with my old colleagues. it's yuzu season and i ordered two boxes from freshland. it's such a delicate flavor. the cupcakes went over well. and i just ordered one more box. the season is short and i absolutely love the citrus perfume-y taste. i might even go non-traditional and do a yuzu pavlova for thanksgiving. 

touch

this is a little twist of what's left of a warp that was made by a weaver named anne grete buhl. i'm not even sure what she made of out of it, but now i have her loom and some of her weaving yarn. these are silk fibers and i love the colors. and i love how they feel in my hand. i'm sure they contain a story. and now i get the chance to continue that story. 

smell

i'm finding smell to be hard. for one thing, there's no good photo for it. as we opened all of the boxes today from anne grete's home, it released a stale old house smell into the room. they had been in her empty house and she died a number of months ago, so i suppose that's natural. she was battling cancer in her final years and no doubt it developed over that time too. the loom i got from her also smelled like smoke. she had smoked for many years and it had penetrated the loom. i spent hours this summer, cleaning it and scrubbing off all of the nicotine. i wondered at one point if we should just make a bonfire, but i think it's more or less ok now. i think the fibers and fabrics can also be freshened up. 

balance

i've had a few situations recently that have upset or frustrated me. i endured a long drive where the main topic was boring car-related talk. like about the best way to take care of your brakes as well an extensive discussion of the switch from summer to winter tires. towards the end of it (i had forgotten my airpods, so i was trapped in the back seat where it was difficult to contribute (what would i have said anyway?) but impossible to tune it out), i thought about opening the door and jumping out. it was that bad. then last friday, one of the same colleagues made two outrageously sexist comments during a presentation. he thought he was being funny. but it wasn't. it's 2025 and he's a director. totally inappropriate. anyway. the point of these dumb stories is that coming home and hanging out with molly can make it all better. she is my balance. 

envision

my sister snapped this picture of the northern lights this week from the yard of our childhood home in south dakota. the sun has been crazy active and so the auroras were strong. alas, it was too cloudy here in denmark, so i didn't get to see any, but man, have i enjoyed her photos. i feel like they could inspire a weaving. look at those amazing colors! 

weekend getaway

our local creative group went on our yearly trip down to the bottom lefthand corner of denmark - højer. (is that how we're supposed to describe a country? i think maybe the picture in my head is too related to the map.) we've been going for quite some years now. there's an affordable big old house we can rent where we can all sleep (it sleeps 13) and an atelier where we can paint and dance and make a mess. and we did all of that. plus making ourselves some lovely food and drinking slightly too much wine and snaps and something called a half bitter that tasted a bit like christmas.  four of the ladies are in their 80s and they are all super cool and fun, each in their own way. i hope to be as curious, funny and spry as they all are should i reach their age. 

one of them painted this watercolor of some members of the group when we went to the beach. i had immediately gone down towards the water, so i'm not in this one. i was wearing clothes that blended into the landscape anyway. 

we all go on these weekends needing something different. some need companionship and people to talk to. some need a break and a change of scenery. i think we all want to be creative. we all bring too many materials. i took four knitting projects (i worked on 3 of them), some watercolors, some journals, fabric and hand-dyed embroidery wool and my linoleum cutting tools. i had no idea what i would want to work on. i think what i ultimately wanted to work on was the food that i made. i bought some beautiful raviolis at the italian supermarket in copenhagen and made three different sauces for them for everyone to enjoy on friday. 

of course, i found myself wanting to work on a knitting project that i hadn't brought along. that's the way it always is. you think you're bringing all the options you have then your brain thinks of something new when it can't have it. at least i restrained from buying new yarn. and that in spite of visiting a yarn shop! all i brought home were sausages from the local butcher and enough renewed energy from all the laughter to last the week.

the emerald jade bathroom

remember that cool floor we got in what's now my weaving studio? now there's one in our upstairs bathroom as well! we're thinking of it as the emerald jade room now! it just went in this morning, so it's not even dry yet. i'll share more photos when it is dry. we're going to leave this one high gloss (we think). soon we'll have a full bathroom that we can use! i can't wait! the never-ending house project marches forward. 

weaving secret messages

i'm not sure if i've mentioned this here, but husband is the kind of guy who is utterly unafraid to rethink things. so after we added the new roof a few years ago, he decided to move the stairs to get to the second floor from where he had originally thought they would be. this involved building a couple of extra meters onto the back of the house. as one does. but it being a rather large undertaking and him being a one-man show, he has discovered that they don't match up 100% as accurately as he would have liked. he thinks this can be hidden by covering that portion of the ceiling with a really cool weaving. 

as one has the weaving bug, i am on board with this, so i am very deep in planning what said weaving should look like. it's not a tiny undertaking, as it's 166cm wide and about 6 meters long. times two. so needless to say, i am looking for inspiration, as i'm still a baby weaver. i know that my loom can handle whatever i throw its way, as it's much more experienced and wise than i am. 

i have this idea that whatever i weave, needs to contain a secret, meaningful message. and since i've been spending a lot of time in the studio, working on a podcast for work, it hit me that it would be possible to weave sound waves. they would look like a cool pattern and if you knew what it represented, it would also contain a message. since that occurred to me, i can't shake the idea. i recorded a meaningful message in the studio the other day and took a photo of the sound wave. i think it has potential.

i ordered up a bunch of weaving books from the library. this one about danish weaver bodil bødtker-næss had some very interesting inspiration in it. it was all i could do not to write and underline everywhere in the book, but i did restrain. i've definitely got to order this one so that i can write in my own copy.

and fold down a bunch of pages, like this one. she wove panels to divide a big open office space for danske bank back in the 70s. they don't look entirely unlike sound waves, eh?

this one could also have a sound wave vibe.

and this one definitely does. i don't think i will directly copy any of these, but they do give me some ideas for how i could approach this. combined with the idea of mounting a weaving on a wooden frame, which i saw at hanne vedel's workshop, i think an idea is forming. but i've yet to settle on a color scheme. i'm doing a few watercolor sketches to try to work out some ideas. i think husband will even build a tiny miniature version of the frames we might want to mount the weavings on, so we can create a paper version. 

i made a test sheet with all of my potential colors. i got some cool gansai tambi japanese watercolors to play with. 

the planning is half the fun. but husband is impatient for me to get started. i'm not even sure yet what kind of yarn to use - linen? wool? cotton? it's quite the adventure.

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.