Blue Roses, designed in 1898, was one of the first wool transparent tapestries by Frida Hansen that I ever saw. I encountered it almost by accident, while attending a conference in New Orleans in 2013. The New Orleans Museum of Art was hosting the exhibition Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World’s Fairs, 1851–1939. Among the 200 objects on display was Blue Roses, one of Hansen’s breakthrough works shown at the Exposition Universelle of 1900.
It was at that fair that her transparent tapestries were first introduced to an international audience—and met with great acclaim. Standing in front of it, I understood why.
(Note: the photos in this post are all mine.)
In 2024, I had the chance to see Hansen’s watercolor sketch for the design in the archives of the Nasjonalmuseet. Up close, you can see the small strokes that indicate the visible red warp threads—a reminder that even in paint, she was thinking like a weaver.
In my open-warp transparent tapestry workshops, students sometimes design their own pieces inspired by Hansen, or weave a section of one of her works. To expand the set of patterns I can offer, I am now weaving a sample based on a detail from Blue Roses—a way of understanding it more deeply by working through it thread by thread.
The design invites variation. Hansen herself explored multiple colorways in some of her transparency designs. These watercolor sketches of Rosentrær and Liljekonvaller (Rose Trees and Lilies of the Valley), also in the collection of the Nasjonalmuseet, show how freely she could reimagine the same forms.
For this sample, though, I chose to stay close to the original colors—at least in spirit.
I began by isolating a single rose using Photoshop. From there, I traced the main outlines onto paper with a light table. What followed was a familiar rhythm: erase, adjust, redraw. Many of the leaves and stems needed to be simplified or shifted to work at a smaller scale. Once the shapes felt right, I committed them in a heavier line. This became the working pattern, ready to be enlarged or reduced as needed.
I warped the loom to a width of 8¾ inches and scaled the drawing to fit. I also colored the pattern—not as a precise guide, but as a way to think through relationships. The markers stand in for yarn; they don’t capture its depth. In Hansen’s original, the gold leaves are a single tone. Here, I’ve allowed them to shift slightly, moving through a range of golds.
Before beginning the rose itself, I wove a narrow border along the bottom: a row of small circles. They echo the rounded forms in the center of the rose. (And perhaps just as truthfully—I never resist an excuse to weave circles.)
The rose will come next.
I’m hoping to finish this in time to bring it to my workshop with the Seattle Weavers Guild later this week—but weaving has its own sense of time, and there are suitcases to pack. We’ll see.
