At the beginning of my Norway/Sweden trip, Ingebjørg Monsen and I visited the Byarkivet [Bergen City Archives]. My holy grail is finding transparent tapestry cartoons and sketches, to try to identify mystery transparencies from the first part of the 20th century. The Byarkivet has a number of records from the Bergen Husfliden [the Handcraft Association]. Even though we knew from the start that their Husfliden records were from the 1950s and were highly unlikely to include transparencies, it was still fun to see the weaving patterns, and we got to see the Archives’ largest book, and fishing records that still smelled like cod! Thank you to Archivist Anders Nilson for helping us explore.
If researchers are interested in work commissioned in the 1950s for boats or churches, and woven by Husfliden, the archives are a fruitful historical source of patterns.
One boat , the MS Venus, even had a whole tapestry woven for the wall. I don’t know any more about it, but it looks like merchants in Bergen – you can see the buildings of the wharf, Tyskebryggen, behind the figures.
There are church textile patterns, some presented in more than one color path.
Here is one pattern and its accompanying yarn chart.
I noticed the church name and think I found a photo of the completed church runner on the website of the Fonna Gravfrdsbyrå.
It makes my heart race whenever I get the chance to unroll history and weaving heritage. I hope that other researchers will work with these records in the future. Perhaps check out the churches to see if the weavings survive? Or, what happened to all the boat textiles?
From our Byarkivet visit, September 15, 2025