Vesterheim 2018 Billedvev Workshop (#2)

Some student stories from my September billedvev weekend workshop #2.

During my workshop the weekend before, Kristen Rummelhart was in Decorah with her daughter for a track meet.  She stopped in the bookstore and Maria Koppen’s book on Norwegian billedvev caught her eye.  She bought it.  The bookstore people told her about the class underway and she stopped up in the classroom. Long story short–she went downstairs and signed up for the course, went home and ordered a Mirrix loom, and showed up the next Thursday with an image in hand, ready to learn and explore.  She was definitely up to the challenge of making the barn with billedvev joins. Somehow she was meant to attend the class.

Kata Bulinski–who won this week’s distinction as the student who traveled the farthest, from eastern Oregon–had a dog in mind to weave. It’s fun to work with students to figure out the best way to weave their images.  We work with tracing paper over an original sketch, discussing which angles will be easy or difficult to weave, and make adjustments.  Kata was a great problem solver.  She ran out of her purple background; she chose another.  She wanted white paws on the dog, because that had significance in the Polish folk tale the dog represented, but they would fade into the light background.  So she made a white patch.

Don’t the bold joins end up looking like the hair of the dog?

Sonja Hoie attended the workshop last year, and came again to attend with her friend Kata. This year, with a better loom (a new Mirrix), and skills under her belt, she dove into some new experimentation.  You can see the pretty lightning border in the photo, but not the completed outlined blue snake! I look forward to seeing what develops on top of her snake.

Mary Glock traveled least; she lives in Decorah. She explored billedvev with a sampler based on the one supplied in Bjorg Christiansen White’s Billedvev book, but made it her own by mixing up the order of the borders and making it colorful.  She chose colors from a giant basket of needlepoint skeins she bought at a local thrift shop.  It was fun for the rest of us to see how the yarn wove up. Part of the fun of being in a workshop is seeing a variety of materials being used, and how they affect the look of the weaving.

Gail Eide was the second student with a dog theme. She started with a heart, because she liked a small heart I wove for Rebecca Mezoff’s Valentine heart challenge a while back (blog post here). Gail was a pretty new weaver, but her architect’s mind figured out the basics quickly, and in a short while she set a new and tricky challenge for herself, to add a paw print in the heart and a beagle at the top. By the time we were discussing the angles and joins for the beagle that will appear above, she completely understood how it will happen.  And she has the loveliest beagle yarn colors in Norwegian prydvev yarn.

Nancy Nordquist, an experienced tapestry weaver from Texas, said she particularly enjoyed the history aspects of my lectures. She liked the bird imagery in old weavings, and out of many bird choices, began to weave her own, inspired by this one. It is found on a plate in Henkik Grosch’s Gammel Norsk Vævkunst: Putetræk of Tæpper i Farvetrykte Gjengivelser, volume 10.

 

I feel like I’m waiting for special gifts to appear in my email, the completed photos of the student pieces.