We go (thrift) shopping

Today Thommas, Jorunn and I set out to see if we could find any interesting textiles for me to buy for inspiration and study. While I did not find any old doublecloth coverlets, I did find some good examples of other Norwegian techniques.

The Salvation Army runs Fretex, a very nice chain of resale shops and we stopped at 3, plus 2 other charity shops. I'm trying to keep my load light but I may have to leave some jeans here to meet the luggage weight limits!

After shopping we drove farther south to a farm area, hoping to have lunch at Hå, a former vicarage that is now a cultural center. Sadly, it was closed except for weekends. We may go back, then I can see the remains of a settlement 8200 years old(!) and the 500 year old graveyard. It was so unusually warm today there was haze and fog over the North Sea coast area. Another reason to return later.

On the way home we stopped for special flatbread, fishcakes, fresh lefse and smoked salmon that will be for another day. Beer tonight was Lervig pilsner and Lucky Jack American Pale Ale, both local to Stavanger. Skål!

Not sure what tomorrow's plan is, we spent the evening watching TV and finishing booking hotels for our trips to Oslo and Bergen. Odd Nerdrum was on their favorite talk show. Very interesting artist/character and some was in English! No help translating needed. Tho I did add a bit to my tiny vocabulary today, in addition to learning a new currency.

Har det!

Preachers Pulpit

I realized after I published the fjord report that I had not included any of Preacher's Pulpit (sometimes just Pulpit Rock in English) so here are some taken today by Thommas. If you can zoom in on the close-up of the top of the cliff you can see tiny people up there. We are NOT climbing up there, so enjoy from below.

Fjords!

Thommas took me on a boat tour of the Lysefjord and Pulpit Rock this afternoon. It's a 3 hour tour (no sign of Gilligan), 2 hours out so they can do multilingual descriptions of the sights and one hour back at speed.

There were quite a lot of summer houses (called huts) on the coast of the Høgsfjord. The Lysefjord was formed by glaciers during the ice ages. During the most recent ice age, about 10,000 years ago, Norway was covered with a layer of ice that was up to 2,000 meters thick.

The waterfall is the Hengjane, 400 meters high. They pull the boat close to the rock wall and use a bucket on a boat hook to catch some water for the tourists to try. Thommas warned me that the lemming population is very high this year so many tiny bodies end up in the streams that lead to the waterfall. We said "nei takk" to the offer.

We also saw Pulpit Rock, an 82'x82' square flat cliff 600 meters above the fjord. I had previously seen an aerial view of the top, it was more impressive to see the hikers sitting on the edge of The Pulpit.

Another highlight was the Vagabond Cave, a tall narrow rock lined inlet they pulled the boat into, totally in shadow, and then played Grieg's Hall of the Mountain King. In Norwegian the title means Trolls, which I prefer to kings.

We saw many houses and farms. One of these days we will drive along the coast road we passed today, to have lunch up near the Pulpit. I also have appointments to see coverlets in both Oslo and Bergen next week and the following week. And there are several museums here in Stavanger I want to see. Best of all is Thommas buying beer for us to enjoy on board. Skål!!

I arrive in Norway!

It was an easy trip here, no problems with planes or bureaucracy. My friend Daniela Kiefaber also did the IGMA show and was flying back to Germany on the same flight. She talked a nice man into trading seats with me so I had company for the 7-1/2 hour flight to Amsterdam. Very foggy there.

I arrived in Stavanger at 11am local time (5am for me). Thommas and Jorunn were waiting for me. I had been told not to sleep until evening, but decided a 2 hour nap would be good. I got up at 3, had some delicious cake and then after a very tasty fish soup, managed to stay awake until 10:30. Next thing I knew it was 9:30am, but I still stayed dozing in bed until noon.

By then my long lost cousin Bjorg came to take me to her house. We shared family pictures and stories and she took me to the church yard where some of our relatives are buried.

I learned a great Norwegian phrase "hulter til bulter" which means helter-skelter. Just like the churchyard we saw.

Now that I've been up for 12 hours I'll go back to bed and tomorrow I'll be on Stavanger time for real. And we're going to see a fjord so I will have more pictures for sure.

Guild show Teaneck, NJ

The Guild Show (same Guild who gave me the Study Award) is up and running full tilt here in Teaneck. My sales table always has a bit of a rummage sale display quality to it.

Partly that's just my nature but also I love that it forces customers to touch the rugs to see what lies beneath. Most have been taught not to touch and so much of the appeal of textiles is the feel or 'hand' of them. It's a delight to see the look on their faces when they discover the drape of a blanket or fineness of a rug that won't make the tiny dining room chair tilt.

The second picture is from the Guild School table, some prototypes for next year, some student projects from this year. The week I spend teaching there each June in Castine, ME is the best of my year.

Oh, customers here, back to work.

Almost time to leave Maine

I've been making progress on the to-do list, in part due to the lawn mowing today being called on account of rain. Good practice for Stavanger, where Thommas promises lots of rain, with the added attraction of it not simply raining "down" but "in all directions". Good thing my mother always assured me "Bonni, you're not sugar, you won't melt". Mom had a hundred of those.

My plan for my 2 cats is to have a couple of friends stop by and make sure things are going smoothly, and to avoid having to ask anyone to clean a litter box, I now have 5 fresh litter boxes standing by (aluminum lasagna pans pre-filled and bagged so no one gets any ideas about unauthorized usage) that can be swapped out until I'm back. I'm pretty pleased with myself for coming up with that one.

I've also finally gotten around to contacting my dad's father's side of the family, turns out there are lots of them in and around Stavanger.  This is the spinning wheel that came over on the boat from Norway to American with my great-grandfather Torvald (Tom) Halverson in 1857, when he was 4. So presumably he was not himself spinning on the voyage, but you never know. We Halversons/Halvorsons/Halversens* are a crafty lot. The wheel itself has a barely decipherable 1849 painted on it, the patina is so dark it's hard to tell what else is there, but there are initials. That orange on the bobbin was spun by me, it's still a working wheel. Thanks to my dad's cousin Irene in South Dakota for entrusting it to me.

For reference, this is my most recent double cloth coverlet. It's a fairly traditional pattern, based on a coverlet I found in an antiques shop. The reason they're called double cloth is that there are literally 2 layers, in this case navy and red or white. Notice that besides the navy, there are either white blocks or red blocks. When the navy and red or navy and white change from the top layer to the bottom, it makes the pattern. On the reverse, the area that looks pinkish is where the red weft (crosswise) weaves with a white warp (lengthwise) or white weft weaves with red warp. The solid navy is always on the face, except tiny blocks in the patterns themselves. Okay, you non-weavers may unglaze your eyes now, what's important is that once I'd figured out the weave pattern, drafted it, keyed it into my weaving program, Fiberworks PC, wound a warp with alternating navy and white or red, dressed the loom, keeping each color in the correct heddle, the weave itself was loom controlled. I just picked up alternating navy and white or red shuttles, treadled and wove. Simple, huh? There are, by the way, 66 threads per layer per inch in this puppy. And it's 1:12 scale, 1"=1'. So about 1100 threads were put on the loom, in the right order. Days. Much neck pain, literally and figuratively.

Why this is important is that Norwegian double cloth coverlets have much more ornate repeating patterns, and they're woven on quite simple looms. Which means the weaver is doing all the work after the loom is dressed. No just stepping on the treadle to raise the proper warp threads, throw the shuttle. Nope. Before throwing the shuttle each time, the correct warp threads must be chosen specifically by the weaver, who slides a wooden sword under the ones she wants, across the width of the coverlet, then she can throw the shuttle. Beat, then pick up the next row. PLUS, the looms are rarely wide enough for a blanket width, even when beds were narrower, so it was woven in two lengths that were stitched together with a center seam. So besides picking up the correct warp threads, care must be taken that the motif length is the same on both panels, or those lions and roosters she wove are not going to match up. These date to the Middle Ages. Yikes!

I'm headed to the International Guild of Miniature Artisans (IGMA) Show in Teaneck, NJ. It starts tomorrow at 6pm with a gala preview. Since this is the group that gave me the Fellow Study Award, it's a great launch pad for my Norwegian adventure. I'll be posting some pictures from the show, both for my friends who can't make it to the show and those who have no idea what a miniature show looks like. Now, back to that list...
*More on the family name later. For the record, I was born a Halversen.

Getting comfy with the Bloggi

I thought it would be smart to figure out the photo part of this before I leave home. Which this is a picture of, by the way. This is the sort of picture I'll be able to post with my iPhone. Can't wait to see if it works.

NOW I'm getting to work on that to-do list.

Getting ready to go (in my fashion)

Today is my last full day off from work to get ready for the show and trip. It's past noon now, and not much of my to-do list has been touched, this does not bode well. The good news is that I've gotten many emails wishing me bon voyage, and the comments section of this blog seems to be working now. Yay!

In preparation for my trip, I've been trying to learn Norwegian. My grandma never spoke Norwegian with the exception of teaching her 3 sons to tell her in Norske that her slip was showing (horror of horrors for her generation) and "takk for maten" - thanks for food and "velbekommen" - you're welcome. The takk for maten routine is all that survives for me and my daughters. I understand that Norwegians today speak English very well, I just think it will amuse them to see me struggle with their language. What better to offer a host than amusement?

So I have been listening to audio lessons on my 18 minute drive home from work. (On the way to work I listen to NPR so I have some bit of world orientation.) I started the lessons 2 years ago, when I first got this grant, then the economy went bust and it seemed not the best time to leave a job that seemed tenuous for 3 weeks, so the trip was postponed.  I resumed the lessons in earnest in June, and I'm not quite back to the place I left off last time. I can order beer or wine, count to ten, and exchange pleasant greetings with some confidence.

The result of learning a language via audiobook in a car, however, is that I cannot read Norske very well. Keep in mind this is a language where the word for "I" is pronounced "y-eye" and is written "jeg". Just like it sounds. To a Norwegian. They also have several more letters in their vocabulary, Å, Æ, Ø. I've got the Norwegian keyboard option on my iPhone, but haven't yet figured out how to get that on my desktop iMac. So essentially, I speak Norwegian like a 2 year-old who can order wine... Or beer, and quite politely, though my language lessons have also pointed out that beer and wine can be very expensive in Norway. We'll see.

Now I'm off to finish glazing the last storm window that was falling apart, weave some rugs, clean the house and start packing. First I'll need to set up the loom, but I've got a solid 12 hours left before falling into bed, right? Good thing I'm so good at ignoring reality.

Launch

Hi. I'm starting this blog at the suggestion of my friend Anna Mae. I'll be leaving for Norway (the country, not the town in Maine, a common misperception when I tell my neighbors where I'm headed) in a week. I've got an app for my iphone that will let me add pictures and comments as I travel, and since experience has taught me that the pictures I take when I travel are perfectly obvious locations at the time, when I get home it's all a blur, this makes perfect sense to me.

I'm going to Norway because the International Guild of Miniature Artisans has awarded me a Fellow Study Award. I'll be looking at Norwegian doublecloth coverlets, which are quite different from the American ones I know and love and have woven in miniature. I knew literally nothing about these Norwegian coverlets, except that they have them, when I applied for the grant. I have since learned a bit more, they are very different from American doublecloth coverlets in not only pattern, but how they are woven. More on that as this blog progresses.

I am also going to be meeting my dad's maternal family for the first time. My grandmother Martha Lunde came to America at the age of 19, basically as an indentured servant, and worked her way to Wisconsin where she met and married my grandpa, Sever Halversen. He was born here, to Norwegian immigrant parents. I hope also to meet some of that side of the family. I will be hosted by Thommas and Jorunn Bjerge, Thommas is a second cousin. I'm hoping to get the family tree sorted out with Thommas' help.

I will be doing the IGMA show in Teaneck, NJ this coming weekend, which means I'll be gone from Maine, and my work at Mobile Marine Canvas for 4 weeks. We've been crazy busy at the canvas shop since spring, so I'm not ready, really, for the show or the trip, but like always I refuse to let reality get in my way. I'll fly from Newark to Stavanger on Monday, the 26th and return the 17th of October.

You are welcome to join me on this adventure. I didn't put Norway into my blog title, in case I decide to continue this in the future.  My daughter Christel had the foresight to check to make sure Bloggi isn't something Ikea sells, and I've run it through my Norwegian translator to make sure it didn't translate into something unfortunate. Neither happened, so I'm going for it.