It is quite a long time since my last post, and I can’t really explain why. I have been busy crafting, and this post will be all about embroidery. Just before the pandemic I joined “Creative embroidery”, an association with enthusiastic and creative members. We collaborate with museums in Stockholm, one at a time around a year. During the pandemic I was passive but last autumn I took part in the activities.

We had an exhibition at the Museum of Etnography called “It is all connected”, about enviroment pollution. My piece was about textile industry and what we have to learn about textile production from ancient times, when textile was among people’s most valuable belongings. The exposure was beautiful and the impression of so many items together was stunning. The message was serious and we had many visitors, among them of course some friends and family of mine.

A few photos of the making of my piece

This year we have worked together with the Strindberg Museum. He was one of Sweden’s most famous authors, and in the house in Stockholm where he had his last home in the beginning of the 20th century is now a museum. His flat is reconstructed the way it was when he lived, including his work desk with pencils and paper. The house was ultra modern at he time in the Art Noveau style. Our first exhibition was an interpretation of the Art Noveau style in a modern context. We had free access to the museum to study and I choose a mixture of elements from a carpet and a glass window in the staircase and then I played with geometric patterns. I stiched in needle point technics in wool yarn. The exhibition was quite impressive with 70 items and had many visitors.

One of Strindberg’s most loved novels is “Hemsöborna” a tragicomic story from the archipelago in the beginning of the 20th century. Our next exhibition will be called “Hemsöborna through the needle’s eye”. This summer I have worked a lot with my piece. We were asked to choose a sentence in the novel as inspiration. My take was to get inspired by the lyric of the landscape that Strindberg mastered to perfection. The sentence I choose would be something like this in English: “The morning was now at the end of July dazzling clear, the sky was blue white as foaming milk, and islands, rocks, islets were so soft melting in the water that you could not say whether they belonged to the earth or the sky”. This refers to the kind of light where there is no visible horizon and the sun is very bright. There is also a lonely man sailing among the islands in an old type of boat with a square sail.

I looked at many photos and paintings to catch the light and colours of the archipelago. I visited two islands in Stockholm archipelago and stayed at nice hostels, walked an sat stitching outdoors. On the island of Möja I visited the museum of Roland Svensson, an excellent artist who painted the scenery of the archipelago. Here some photos from my efforts: