First off, we had uneventful flights through Iceland into Copenhagen which felt like a miracle given all the air travel horror stories one hears about these days. After recovering from jet lag we met up with my nephew, Matt, and his girlfriend and did Copenhagen. Castles, museums and sauntering along the canals and cobblestone walkways was lovely. They have a lot of rain so the flowers were beautiful. Copenhagen has a café culture which means the locals are out morning, noon and night enjoying friendly chatter while savoring local brews in the evening. Their small intimate pubs are great and close early being more about socializing than drinking. Our first culinary experience was a 7 course adventure in a small intimate environment with local delights including herring, tongue and a few other things I would never order but found quite tasty as small portions in the manner in which they were prepared. I think there were three different dessert courses but I lost track with libations accompanying each course. The next evening we went to a greenhouse restaurant on top of a building with a large rooftop garden. The restaurant does only two family style seating’s a night at long tables accommodating about 20 people. The theme, of course, was use of all the organic veggies grown in their gardens shown off with lots of edible flowers. Being on the coast meant lots of seafood and there were even some lucky chickens living their best lives on the rooftop. My nephew did great work orchestrating such lovely restaurant experiences.
After several days in Copenhagen, Paul and Matt headed out to hike along the northern coast of Denmark while I took the train to southern Sweden, known as Skane, and met up with four fellow weavers for a Swedish rug weaving workshop. The four other attendees were also from the US and were seasoned weavers. Our rug weaving course was held in a Weaving/Loom Museum in Glimakra where many locally produced looms were on display profiling different kinds of textiles. Our teacher was a well-known Swedish rug weaver but quite down to earth about her craft. Our first order of business was to dye fabrics for our chosen color palate and chose a pattern we wanted to create before warping the looms. She had already gotten the yarn on the beams so our job was to dress our individual looms, which means getting all the treads through the appropriate heddles, lashed on the beam creating appropriate tension and hooked up to the right treadles under the loom. Swedish looms are often described as nothing but sticks and strings which I would concur with given the difficult process of getting the loom properly warped.
Once dry, we ripped our fabric into stripes and began the process of weaving our individual rugs. I will spare you all the trials and tribulations along the way but four days later I finished up a lovely black, grey, navy and mustard striped rug. I learned a lot, particularly about the need to dye fabric to get robust colors in your rugs and the need to rip thin enough stripes and use contrasting colors to show off the patterns chosen for weaving. I also learned how to use a large wood temple which keeps the edges of rugs consistent as one weaves. Anyway, mostly I learned if I want to produce more interesting quality rugs, I will need to put more time and effort into the process. We also visited a handful of area weaver’s studios where regional and world renowned weavers are engaged in custom tapestry weaving, bringing new life to old Swedish techniques, creating beautiful liturgical garments and large custom rugs, all of which take months, and often years, to produce. It was all quite fascinating and overwhelming to our group of simple home weavers. Oh, and we stayed in a lovely Swedish inn with beautifully styled rooms and a lovely restaurant with a full buffet style breakfast every morning featuring fresh local fare.
After my workshop ended, I met up with Paul at the train station in Malmo, Sweden where we spent several days touring before ending our trip in the southern Swedish city of Lund. Again, we were lucky with routine flights home and have been in recovery mode since. It was a great trip!