My October workshop in Frida Hansen’s open-warp technique was held at Kirsi Manni’s home, studio and perhaps unofficial textile museum in Dalarna, Sweden. Each room abounded with collections of textiles, equipment and yarn. This selfie includes a mirror lined with Swedish folk costume embroidered pockets. You can glimpse just a few of her carved mangle boards on the wall behind me.
I was most enamored with her collection of carved distaffs for spinning linen. When in use the pointed part would face up; a bundle of prepared linen stalks would be bundled around the point, and the spinner would pull down the flax fibers while twisting them to create linen thread.
The bundle of prepared flax was often tied to the top of the distaff with a beautifully woven band. Kirsi Manni demonstrates how the bands were wrapped in this video, and also shows another way to hold the flax in place on the distaff–with a triangular tube of eel skin. (Eel!)
These beautiful carved traditional linen-making tools inspired me to weave a small tapestry. The distaffs may have been carved by a young man for his betrothed. The symbols of love and protection remain relevant. I used hearts and crosses to continue my experimentation with linen as a material in Frida Hansen’s open-warp transparency technique.
When Frida Hansen developed her transparent tapestry technique and took out a patent on it in 1897, she specified a wool warp and wool weft. The technique of leaving some warp unwoven works well with wool warp and weft, because the small fibers along the shafts of the yarn want to cling to one another. But will it work using linen? Will the linen have enough “stickiness” to hold the woven shapes together and not slip down the unwoven warps? I’ve been experimenting with linen as warp, and it has worked well. With my new distaff tapestry, I tested whether linen would work well as a weft, with wool as the warp.
I warped a pipe loom with indigo-dyed wool of various intensities.
In Kirsi Manni’s studio it wasn’t hard to find a skein of tow linen, with a rough and grippy texture, to try as weft. The yarn that looked like the best weight had a brownish cast. “Oh, we’ll scour it,” Kirsi said. The yarn would become lighter and more golden. Scouring meant soaking the skein in water with soda ash. Below is the skein of linen, Kirsi warming the water on the stove, the first release of pectins and stray plant materials, and then the dirty water left after the scouring was done.
I drew a cartoon of one of Kirsi’s historical distaffs. I liked the slight unevenness of the hand-carved design.
The irregular, bumpy, rough surface of the handspun linen yarn had no problem staying in place on the wool warp. There is variation in how well the weft covers the warp. Where the linen is thin, it packs in fully, but where the thread is thick or bumpy, the underlying warp peeks through. The overall effect is a pleasing, handspun rustic surface.
After the class I met my husband for a Stockholm holiday, which turned out to be another opportunity to admire carved distaffs. These were on the wall of the cafe inside the Lady Hamilton Hotel.
The carved openings were what first drew me to Kirsi’s distaffs. In my tapestry, the unwoven spaces became as important as the woven hearts and crosses. The rough linen preserved something of the unevenness I admired in the carving—and a tool once used to hold flax became the inspiration for weaving with it.