Carol Johnson’s Tapestries–Buildings and Landscapes

The final wall of “Scandinavian Tapestry Treasures from the Collection of Carol Johnson,” features outdoor scenes, buildings and landscapes. The display is up at the Weavers Guild of Minnesota through April 12, 2019. Thanks again to Carol Johnson for sharing the fruits of her passion for obtaining Scandinavian textiles. You can read more about Carol came to own a houseful of textiles in “A Passionate Pursuit: Scandinavian Weavings from the Collection of Carol Johnson,” published in 2018 in The Norwegian Textile Letter.

This is the last of a series of posts to document the weavings in the tapestry exhibit for those who can’t make a trip to the Weavers Guild. Previous posts documented the tapestries in the people category, the floral category, the animals and abstracts category. and some boundweave Gubbatäcke weavings in the “other” category (post 1, post 2). Photos of all the walls are here.

One image should be familiar to many people, as it graces the cover of a well-known Swedish tapestry book that includes the pattern, Flamskvävnad: Flemish Weaving, by Ernst Fischer and Gertrud Ingers (Västeros: ICA Förlaget, 1961).

This boat tapestry was woven horizontally, with beautiful color blending accomplished in doubled wefts. When vertical lines appeared, the weaver used both interlocking (in the gray bands of the dock) and slits (on the top of the brown square on the boat and the roofs of the small buildings).

I liked the way the weaver gave the look of vertical siding on the house with occasional, irregular stripes.

“IP” was the weaver.  It was woven horizontally, with festive colors and lots of decorative pointed dovetail joins.

This piece was woven in double-interlock rölakan technique. It might be just me, but it is a little too much like paint by number kits to be appealing.

This landscape was woven vertically.

This piece was woven in thick yarn, and is one of the few pieces in the collection with the ends tucked in on the back side; it is reversible. It was woven vertically, which is easy to see if you look at the interlocking joins on the tall tower and the sides of the houses.

This image might be an immigrant ship–maybe it’s appropriate that Carol bought it and it came to the U.S.? It was woven horizontally, with long interlocked lines.

It’s fun to examine the scale of the parts of this image–the boat, the cat, the seagull.

Good night and good-bye with the starry evening image.  The tapestries will be up at the Weavers Guild until April 12.  Stop by if you have a chance.