I used to be a weaver

During my art teacher education, I chose to specialize two years in weaving. For some time, I aimed to make a living out of weaving, but soon had to give up. When my son was six and I found myself a single parent again, I settled for teaching. I still rented a study and tried to do as much weaving as I could on my spare time.

I loved working with scarfs in soft, delicate wool and shiny silk.

We were taught how to develop and construct the bindings ourselves. The technical complexity and the  ancient history of this craft where the things that attracted me to it. Weaving has such deep roots in our cultural history and womens history and our vocabulary is still full of weaving related words and sayings. 

-Like "the Internet weave". In Norwegian, like: "Å ha bukta og begge endene" og "neste innslag".

I worked a lot with constructing fabrics as soft as possible. The three scarfs shown are bindings I have constructed. The one with black and white stripes became my signature weave. Allowing the scarf to have a beautiful fall, softness and beeing a sturdy binding at the same time. One of the last things I constructed was a binding where I joined two separate scarfs so it could have different colours and stripes on both sides. It ended up too thick. More like a coat fabric, so I gave up the project.

Weaving is very time consuming and I guess I don't have the patience I need in the long run. I also felt limited by mainly beeing able to express myself through stripes and squares. I was happy to move over to the more spontaneous craft that screenprinting represent. But I'm still proud to be a carrier of a heritage craft.

This scarf is inspired by stained glass and it's a school project.