mandag 31. oktober 2011

Eplas Jul

Moa og jeg er med i boken Eplas Jul.
Vi viser hvordan du og barna kan lage fine julegaver og gaveposer med potettrykk.



Eplas Jul er en stemningsfull og koselig bok med mange fine ideer til juleforberedelsene.
Boken kan kjøpes i dagligvarebutikker og kiosker og her hos Epla.

My daughter, Moa, and I are in the book "Eplas Jul". We show you how you can make gifts for Christmas with potato prints. It is in Norwegian and can be bought here.

Have a lovely week!
I'll be making gifts (your Christmas gifts?) for two markets this year. Eplas Julebasar and DEJM. (The Designers' Christmas market in Oslo.)

mandag 24. oktober 2011

Christmas teatowels


Today I've printed the first reindeer teatowels. And Epla har launched their book: Eplas Jul.
Suddenly I feel that I'm  longing for Christmas and looking forward to it for the first time in many years. I am looking out the window almost expecting to see snow falling.
I wish this feeling can stay and stay all the way to the holidays this year.
I wanted to share these photos with you. They are from last year. I had a small photo shoot all by myself in the garden of Drammens Museum.



If you want to buy a reindeer teatowel, you can get it in my Epla shop and my Etsy shop.



And here's a link to Eplas Jul. A Norwegian book with inspiration, DIY's and recipes. It looks super cozy! I can't wait to see it.


torsdag 20. oktober 2011

Halloween at work


My day job is at Røyken videregående skole, an upper secondary school in Buskerud, Norway.
One of the courses I'm teaching is Interior and visual merchandising.
The students wanted to showcase a Halloween display for a local pumpkin farmer this year. I think it looks so good, that I wanted to share it with you. It is my fabulous coworker Tor Hemma who has been the teacher behind this work.
Well done, Tor! And to my students: Great work, girls! -I'm proud of you all.




onsdag 19. oktober 2011

Win a teatowel!


I'm having a giveaway.
You can win a teatowel of your own choice from my shop
and at the same time help me with some great new ideas...


I have stocked my shops with my popular teatowels. So if you are looking for a gift for Christmas or maybe one for yourself, you know where you can find them. (Etsy, Epla)
Hopefully, there will be Reindeer teatowels soon too.


But I have been thinking a lot about making teatowels with a text.
-A quote, maybe a recipe, or something else?
I'd love to hear your suggestions! I'm welcoming both english and norwegian suggestions.
Each suggestion must be posted separately in a comment, and maximum 5 entries pr person.
Lucky me will choose my favorite word/text and that is the winner!
I will also randomly draw an additional winner among the comments.
The giveaway will be closed November 10.


(I'm reserving myself the right to use or not use the suggestions posted here.)

søndag 16. oktober 2011

Sunday Etsy Favorite: andODesign


I just love the designs from and O Design in Australia.
This is what she writes in her Etsy shop profile:

"and O design was founded by Yumi Ando in June 2010. She is a Japanese ceramicist based in Melbourne, Australia.

All the and O design items are hand-built using clay slab techniques and are made in small batches from a small home based studio. The designs are inspired by both Japanese and Australian cultures."




Have a look in the SHOP.


mandag 10. oktober 2011

designskool


My water colour teatowels were featured on the beautiful blog, designskool, by Justine Hand today.
Thank you so much, Justine!

lørdag 8. oktober 2011

Dahlia & Saturday


This might be the last flowers from my garden this year.
It's expected frost tomorrow, so we'll see what's left after that.
It is lovely and sunny outside. I will be painting the garden shed today.
Hopefully there will be some time left for a little printing later.

Have fun today!

fredag 7. oktober 2011

October favorites from Etsy

Here's a lovely felted purse from egluzem.

To me the different months have their individual colour scheme.
It's not based on the colours in nature like you could expect, but on the letters their names consists of.
When I think of letters and numbers, they have different colours and so the words are coloured by the dominant letters. Like October. These Etsy favorites I will share with you today, represent the colours of October. The dark blue/grey month.
I know not many people have colours on letters, but some do. I believe it's called syntestesia.
What are your relation to letters, numbers, months and colours?

Linen peshtemal from 1001days.

Messenger bag from memake.

Desk caddy made by Peg and Awl.

Linen tunic by Pamela Tang.

I hope you'll have a lovely weekend!

onsdag 5. oktober 2011

New designs


I've continued my work with the water color inspired designs. This time I've been painting on vintage linen towels. Some of them had stains that didn't go off in wash. Then I've covered the marks with the painting. 






Here's one inspired by party and pompons.


You can find the teatowels in my Etsy shop and my Epla shop.

tirsdag 4. oktober 2011

Anjas wonderful garden


I just had to show you this wonderful image from Blomsterhagen på Abildsø.
Anja grows organic cut flowers and sells them on farmers markets.
Follow her facebookpage to be updated on where she sells her flowers and see the beautiful floral photos she shares!

Dahlias are really some of my favorite flowers.

søndag 2. oktober 2011

Plant dyeing


My daughter and I did some dyeing on wool and silk this summer.
We used Lady's Mantle (Alchemilla Mollis) (Marikåpe) to dye with.


We chopped the leaves a little. If you shall do this properly, and get the best result possible, you need to boil and simmer the leaves in water first, then strain it before you put the yarn into the boiler.
We were in a hurry, so we just put it all together.  The main problem with our method was to separate the leaves from the wool later...


The easiest and most common materials to plant dye is wool and silk.
They are both animal fibres and they react similar to dyes.
Here's wool yarn, wool, tied silk fabric and silk fabric.


The dyeing process goes like this:

1. Soak the material in lukewarm water for at least two hours.
2. Dissolve the alum (alun) in a small amount of water. Then add the rest of the water. Heat to 50 degrees Celcius. Put the material in the boiler and continue heating till 90 degrees. (Just below the boiling point.) Let the material simmer at this temperature for one hour. Let it cool down and press carefully out as much water as possible.
3. Make the dye bath by putting the plant material in water, heat to the boiling point and let it simmer for two hours. Remove the plant material and cool down to 50 degrees Celsius.
4. Add the wool/silk into the color bath. Heat to 90 degrees and keep that temperature for at least one hour. Let the color bath cool down. Preferably over the night.
5. Wash the year/fabric carefully in cold water and let it dry.


How much plant material?
-This is different from plant to plant. A plant dyeing book will help you with this.
If you live in Norway, there is some very good, old books (from the 70's and 80's) on the subject.
I recently bought this american (?) book, Harvesting Color by Rebecca Burgess.  It has lovely inspiring photos and recipes for the different plants, but a lot of them are native american plants that we don't find here in Norway. Her er link til en svensk/norsk bok.


We used a 5 litre boiler for 100 grams of textile material. (A 10 litre container is the best.)

This is a recipe I found at Lyngheisenteret:
100 g tørkede plantedeler
100 g garn eller stoff (ull eller silke)
5 liter vann
16 g alun




The textile material should be moved carefully around in the boiler all of the time to get an even result. We didn't, so the fabric to the left has some variations. The fabric to the right is tied with string to get a tie-dye result.

The finished yarn and fabric smells wonderfully!

My next projects are dyeing with mushrooms and working out how to dye cotton. This is considered very difficult, but it must be possible. I have seen it done, so I will figure out how.
This blog, Naturally Dyeing, shows several examples of dyes on cotton, but does not have any recipes.
At the moment, I'm trying to get some dye mushrooms picked and dried before the winter is here.

We did some plant and mushroom dyeing with our students some weeks ago. Here's a link to our class blog. The students have written an article (in Norwegian) were you can see lovely photos and read about the project.
P.S. I think the students will appreciate a comment from you!