October textile and jewellery

Autumn has arrived early this year with lots of rain and the leaves are already falling off after an outburst of autumn colours. Time for walks in parks in Stockholm and time for indoor activities like craft making!

One of the last days in September I went with a friend to the county of Dalarna where she has recently bought a small cottage. The temperature was 4° C with drizzling rain mixed with snow so I just took one photo, which shows the barn with the cottage in the background. The cottage belongs to a group of old houses called “fäbodvall” in the middle of the forest. In former days farms in the north of Scandinavia moved their cattle up in the mountain forests for grazing leaves during the summer months. This was better than trying to grow enough fodder around the farm.  It was young women who kept the cattle, protected it from wild animals and took care of the milk, making butter and cheese.  The young women ( in fact in their teens) lived on their own for several months and this of cause made them more self- confident and independent than many other women at the time. Today most of the old houses are kept as summer-cottages. I will tell more about this later on when we visit the cottage again at springtime.

As I have mentioned I have become a member of the textile group “Skapande broderi” and we meet once a week.  I am of course excited to learn more about what they have achieved before. Last year they collaborated with “Postmuseum” in Stockholm which resulted in an exhibition called “Postal art”. It will go on until the end of December. I visited it a few days ago. I was amazed! Such creativity and artistic fantasy  with endless variations around the subject “mail” . I was more than ever convinced that embroidery is an art form.

I am really inspired by this unconventional and creative use of needle and thread. I have always thought of embroidery as painting with yarn and this really confirms it. The current theme is the Middle age and I am now working on a pair of images with fantasy animals. Sometimes the back of the work is ever so interesting as this photo shows:

This year we are at “The Swedish History Museum”, a museum that deals with early history up till the Renaissance. This is what Skapande broderi has contributed with so far:

And from my silversmith bench: Yes I have been quite busy with that too. For the first time I have been able to make a new item from scrap silver. I melted down all the leftovers of silver I had and  thanks to the new rolling mill I could mill it to a nice even sheet 1,2 mm thick. From that I made this ring with granules and a turquoise. I also want to show you how helpful the titanium strips are that I bought a while ago. You can shape them according to your needs and they are excellent. It makes soldering so much easier.

Thanks to the rolling mill I can also make my own filigree wire, it is so good to be able to lavish with wire. This is a new filigree pendant and a pair of ear pendants with kyanite gems. A lovely blue stone with stripes looking a litte like sapphire but much cheaper.

Finally a ring with filigree and claw setting which is new to me. The stone is carneol. That’s all for now! Thank you for reading and I would really appreciate any feedback! Maybe you have some advice or experience to share, would be so interesting!