Challenge WIPs

So... I tried keep up with Heather Powers' Jewelry Making Mojo Challenge, but because of the schedule it ended up being in the middle of a busy period so this far, this last week of the twelve, I've only finished a few pieces and have a few WIPs that's somewhere between finished and barely started on.

One piece that's finished or not depending on how you look at it is this circular thing.

Inspired by Heather Kingsley-Heath's books on albion stitch (which I reviewed here), I wanted to make something with inspiration from etruscan jewellery for the week 9 assignment "ancient history". If you google etruscan jewellery, you'll soon find a lot of circular pendants and earrings and it's those designs I had in made when making this piece.

The design is very simple, partially because I didn't follow any pattern so this was just a first test. At first, the design ended with a row of picots, but while it looked very pretty it didn't feel etruscan. All etruscan designs I saw had a clean cut edge. So I added a final row of beads, which I really screwed up, getting the bead count wrong so it doesn't lay flat as well as having to back engineer the thread path, making the thread too visible.

I'm hoping the next version will look better.


The second assignment I'm working on is the week 8 colour palette inspiration challenge. For it, I picked out a random palette that caught my eye. It happened to be this one from Pattern Pod (from this pin).

Not my usual type of colour scheme, but still not too out there. After looking through the bead stash and deciding I would have to start focus on my favourite techniques even if they're slow (I often stick to stringing and simple wire wrapping in short challenges in order to be sure I can finish it in time, but many times it just ends up with me being unhappy as it isn't my forte). In this case it meant hand embroidery and I have just the perfect colours of cotton floss of the palette. Finding a silk sample, I even found some grey to use.

Now... That's as far as I've come... I have a design -- flower with light yellow details for a small round brooch or pendant -- but haven't started embroidering it yet.

The metal component you can see in the first pic was just something I took out as the colour combos in this old WIP is roughly the same as in the palette and the floss -- which made it a good fit for the extra challenge of the week, which was to make two pieces using the same palette, but with different proportions between the colours.

Apart from that I'm also working on a few jewelry redos as per the week 5 assignment, but they haven't come very far either. I'm just creating WIPs at the moment -- and dreaming of starting a new big project, but feeling it'd better be left until after the harvest season is over. There's also other ideas like making a maschma/marsma that'll have to wait a bit -- though that's mostly a matter of procrastinating because I'm not that fond of sewing. Embroidering -- yes! Sewing -- meh...

Gifts from the soil -- job benefits and slow jewellery

As I've mentioned on a couple of occasions before, one of the job benefits my sis and I enjoy when working in the potato fields is collecting stones and especially flints. The other day, when removing some of the fiberweb (the white sheets the early potato fields are covered in during spring) I made my best find yet. A flintstone arrow head! It really made my day, I was just so thrilled about it!

Since beginning to collect/hoard flintstones as a kid I've dreamed of finding something like the one and a half axes grandpa found in his fields, but so far I've just found stone and nuggets that, as a layman, I could just guess might've been partially formed by a human hand. This is the first piece I've found that I'm 100 % sure has been formed by man. It was pretty exciting to find, especially since I found it while being busy working and I was so close to not picking it up. Luckily, the unusual rectangular shape and light colour made it stand out and tempt my eyes. I was just pure luck that the edge of the fiberweb stopped just there and that the plowing and digging had unearthed the piece just in time for me to find it.

Now you might say "well, have you reported the find?" I'm very well aware -- and very proud -- of the laws protecting our cultural history, but generally flint items are so common länsstyrelsen in Skåne isn't that interested in single finds like this (I asked them once because of the beautiful stone age axe my grandpa gave me so I'm not just going by hearsay on this). Though I would be interested in contacting someone to learn about the age, use etc of my find. I've seen similar arrow heads that's been dated to the end of the ice age, ca 11-12 000 years old. That's as far back as you can go with artefacts in these areas that used to be covered by the ice sheet.

It isn't a big piece either. I didn't have a ruler nearby so I took a photo of it next to an AA battery for a size comparison:

In other news, I just sowed some jewellery making supplies. Another gift from the soil that I expect later in summer.

No, I'm not being barmy: what I'm talking about is sowing flowers to dry for making cute jewellery. Like this:

(Screen shot of an Etsy treasury I made. Many pieces are sold,
but you can still find what's left of the treasury here.)

I know you can buy dried flowers, but not always the ones you want and buying from a florist or what few commercial cultivators of everlasting flowers there are in the 21st century can be a tad expensive. So I thought I might as well try to sow a few seeds. I'm not useless at gardening, but I'm no expert either. It was dad that was the expert, lovingly caring for an expanding garden -- and teaching us kids the art and craft of it. I haven't cared that much for gardens in years, mainly because I haven't had one of my own where I could do what I wanted.

But this year, I was so inspired by the poetic mori-style jewellery I couldn't keep myself from buying some seeds. Fingers crossed I've got green fingers (or green thumb as some of you say) and there'll be at least a couple of flowers to harvest.

You've heard about slow food and even slow cities, well, I guess this is slow jewellery! I'll take me months to make a simple pendant if counting from yesterday when I sowed the seeds.

If any flowers do seem to be popping up, I'll keep you updated.

And if you wonder about the fiberweb, it's not to keep the soil and seeds warm or anything -- it's mainly an attempt to keep the cats from thinking the newly weeded and raked soil is a big new litter box... Think it'll keep them out? Well, perhaps as long as they don't realise how warm it can be under a sheet like this, or indeed on it. Then they might want to sleep on it instead, something the plants won't like either. Gardening with cats isn't always easy.

Look what I won! (An embroidery WIP)

I don't always flaunt stuff I win, but this time I just had to. Partially because it's also a WIP as it included both a big book and an wool embroidery kit.

In the last minute I managed to send my e-mail and participate in a contest at the website Textil hemslöjd where I could win a book by Ulla Oscarsson that offers glimpses into the textile history of Jämtland and Härjedalen (two provinces in northern Sweden) and an embroidery kit for a big bridal cushion modelled after one made in the late 18th century in Jämtland. The book is called Kvinnomöda och skaparglädje, which loosly translates to women's effort and creativity/joy of creating.

Just have to show you a few pages of the book. It really covers everything from what fibres were used, what textiles were bought rather than made at home, what clothes people used through the ages, what textiles was used in the house, how they did laundry, what the embroideries looked like and what a bride wore. And, yes, it does include the Överhogdal tapestries.

The book with the loose banner with the title on

(Notice how the wind tried to "help" me today. Don't know what photo assistants I prefer: weather or cats...)

A very interesting book to read, even for those that like me have no connection to the region. After all, some of the history we do share in the rest of Sweden or Scandinavia -- and other parts become interesting just because of the local and regional differences.

I finished the book last night (or morning if we're being picky) so now I'm turning my focus on the second part of the prize: the bridal cushion kit.

It'll be one of my bigger embroidery projects considering it's 50 cm wide -- and the first time I work with wool. This will be a meeting between a 18th century embroiderer from Jämtland and a 21st century beader from Skåne and I will be adding my own touch to it.

That's really where I am at the moment, planning on how and where to include beads. Because it will of cause need beads! I'm not one to follow a pattern -- and everything is better with beads. Beads don't seem to have been very common in the embroidery of that time and place: I spotted very little beads in the book. It seems to have be a bit more common in other areas (like Skåne), but in general swedish folk tradition didn't really include much beading. So this project really will be a fusion between places and ages once I bead it.

One big part of the planning process is determining what beads to include: they need to match the embroidery yarns I got in the kit as I won't be substituting with anything from my own thread stash. An excuse to buy more beads? Hrmm... Maybe. I will try to do my best and see if I can't use what I already have, but this is a bit different from my usual style so bead shopping might be necessary for the best result.

Might have to make a few swatches to test bead-yarn combos first. Or just test combinations of embroidery and beading stitches. I want to do some beaded herringbone stitch. That's all I really have decided at this point.

So stay tuned to see what happens, but I warn you: I'm a slow embroiderer. This won't be done in the next couple of weeks!

Fritillary

It's spring and the crocus are in full bloom. I took photos of them both in the beginning of the week and today, but have been too busy to post any photos. There's also a few other flowers beginning to bud. The fritillary is not one of them. It's from the shop and sits in a pot indoors.

I've developed a penchant for this flower, Fritillaria meleagris aka snake's head aka kungsängslilja, recently. As you can see amongst my pins. There's one, two, three and even four photos pinned that I found just at the top of the boards. (And notice how in almost all of them, they're matched with another favourite of mine, the hellebore.)

We used to have these flowers by the wall of the smaller building where my sis and I live, but they disappeared years ago. At the time I didn't miss them that much as they weren't my favourites, but of cause it was sad to see them thinning out and then, one year, just be gone and never coming back. Then I forgot about them more or less. Until recently when seeing all those gorgoues photos of this both delicate and striking flower. Don't know if it was just its beauty or -- at least partially -- a touch of nostalgia that made me drool over the pics.

Now I adore it. Unusually, it's especially as a cut flower I love it. Combined with a few hellebores or on its own. Perhaps just a single flower with leaves in a clear vase. Normally I prefer living flowers with roots in soil, especially out in the garden or in nature. Flowers in a vase is just not really my thing. Sometimes it's nice, though, and sometimes it's a way to "save" a flower with broken stem for a while. Or you put them in water in order to let them develop roots so they can be planted. But just buying bouquets every now and then to decorate tables etc? No, that's not my cup of tea. I don't even find a dozen red roses romantic because of that.

Anyway, I mentioned that I wanted a snake's head fritillary as my sis and I went to a flower shop to pick up a couple of daffodils. Though they were a tad expensive, though, so I didn't buy, but apparently it'd rubbed off on my sis so she bought a pot. The one in the pic above.

The legend of the snake's head fritillary

Why not take the opportunity to tell of the legend of the snake's head? In swedish it's called kungsängslilja, named after Kungsängen (lit. the king meadow) outside Uppsala. The area is known for the fritillaries, which thrive here. It's the biggest wild fritillary population in the nordic countries. You can find both the usual checked variety seen in these photos, but also some of the white variety that is less common.

According to local lore, the fritillaries here are a memory of a battle between swedes and danes, back in the days a common thing as the wars between Sweden and Denmark were many. For every dane killed on the battlefield, a red flower grew and for every dead swede a white flower grew. As the swedes won a great victory with few casualties the white flowers are very scarce.

A season of Strauss

Well, I should be doing something else right now as I'm going to bed early (must get up around 6 o'clock tomorrow! Too early, way too early!), but I thought I might show you the latest flyers from the museum next door.

This year, the theme will be Richard Strauss. If you're into opera you might have already guessed it from Birgit's costume above. Let's see if we manage to get around to visit the museum this season: living near an attraction or event doesn't necessarily mean you attend it all the time. It's easy to become hemmablind ("home blind", not appreciating or visiting what is nearby as you're so used to it or because you look at the wonders of other places, you don't really see it anymore).


If you're interested in the Birgit Nilsson Museum and what it has to offer this season (or an interest in my old neighbour, Birgit), be sure to check out the museum website! She did own some lovely jewellery and while they aren't the main focus of the exhibits, you might want to visit just for the jewellery inspiration. There's also great costumes, accessories, music etc to inspire -- and if you're lucky, you might even meet one of our cats if you visit the museum. ;-)

Weaving beats wheels in my book

You know how a lot of people will tell you the wheel was the greatest invention (though some will agree it was not much use without the invention of the axis)? Well, I think one of the greatest inventions of mankind was weaving. With weaving (and braiding/knotting, which is related), we could suddenly make all sorts of things: baskets, chair seats, fabrics, nets, sails, latticework for fences and walls, sieves, ribbons, rugs, bags etc etc. Even birch bark shoes. First perhaps things of function, of great importance in daily life, but humans being humans we also started to create things of beauty -- not just beauty in function or functional design but in pure aesthetics. With the technology and art of weaving, people could make everything from woven jewellery and hair braids for personal adornment to essential everyday items to cool artwork.

In a way, I'm in love with weaving, adore it and am fascinated with how it can be so, so simple and so, so complex -- despite once having to solva, string the warp threads into the heddles on a large  loom, in school (it's perhaps the most boring part of weaving) as a kid and then never getting to test it. In the syslöjd (approx. needlecraft class) room at school, the loom mostly, well, loomed in a dark corner, rarely being used by the pupils. Perhaps partially because it's time-consuming to set up and usually you let kids weave a bit, creating e.g. a placemat, one after the other so kids couldn't take their piece home until all the pupils have done their bit and the warps could be cut off. Or maybe the grown ups were tired of the, at that time, subsiding weaving fad.

I'm too young to remember the weaving craze of the 60's and 70's when weaving suddenly became cool again with the new "hippie" ideologies of counter urbanisation, anti-corporate ideals, eco-friendliness and an a renewed interest in traditional handicrafts. At that time, many so called vävstugor, weaving cottages, were created were people who couldn't afford or didn't have the room for large heddle looms could come and weave. Today there are more than 600 such vävstugor in Sweden with more than 6000 looms.

But despite that impressing figure, the interest in looms have declined or at least it did in the 80's and 90's when I grew up. Just a few years ago, it would be easy to find looms for free as people who inherited them just wanted to get rid of them -- for lack of interest in weaving or lack of space. "Take it or it's off to the tip with it", they'd say. We got a (professional) loom from an old woman that used to work for the Märta Måås-Fjetterström studio that my dad reclaimed for the top-quality wood. Ok, it wasn't in pristine condition, but even if it had been, she or her family would've found it hard to find anyone willing to take it and keep it as a loom.

But growing up in an age where weaving was kind of outdated as a craft, I still do have a few connections to the art and craft of loomwork that might've subconsciously affected my views of weaving. First of all, we've probably all played with little cardboard weaves in preschool, weaving with  Secondly, anyone involved in hemslöjd (traditional [domestic] handicrafts) will tell you Sweden has a long and strong weaving tradition, it's part of our cultural heritage, but most of all I live in an area where women in the old days often worked as weavers at one point or another in their lives. We still have two very different types of weavers left: the linen weaving mill in Boarp and the older and more famous studio of Märta Måås-Fjetterström. One of our neighbours, who passed away many years ago, used to be a weaver as was the weaver of another later neighour of ours. My mom used to help an elderly woman, the one mentioned above, who was a weaver and even had her own loom, a gift from the former employer upon retiring if I remember correctly. And, even closer to me, my aunt was once a weaver at the famous Märta Måås-Fjetterström studio. She still has a big (expensive) carpet from that time in her home -- and we have a small tapestry, probably meant to be a cushion, of the same make.

I don't know if it's directly affected me, but seeing not only woven objects but also the traces of the weavers and tools more or less everyday must have made me aware of the beauty and necessity of weaving, consciously or unconsciously.

The Märta Måås-Fjätterström studio in Båstad

Now, while "large scale" weaving on a proper loom (i.e. big heddle loom) is something I can admire others' work with, I'm not even tempted to try it myself. Personally, I'm more interested in working on the smaller scale, weaving ribbons (without a loom), working with small DIY looms using all sorts of mixed fibres, novelty yarn and unconventional materials (see the pinboard above for examples of that), having fun with these looms, giving the bead loom a new chance -- the latter is something that I've been especially interested in after seeing work using other beads than the traditional seed bead, spotting the Mirrix bracelets mixing fibre and beads and finding Erin Simonetti's blog.


I've got a soft spot for yarns, threads and fibres in general but try not to becomes as obsessed with that as with beads as it could end up being very expensive... Weaving, embroidery and jewellery-making are all great crafts that give me excuses for buying new fibres and lend themselves to a lot of experiments with said fibres.

While my book stash is vast, I've never really bough any books about weaving -- with one exception: a tiny  60's or 70's book on weaving on small DIY looms that I got at the library sale  (the annual "buy it before we throw it in the incinerator" drive). It was a few years ago when my interest in weaving hadn't bloomed yet and I just happened to stumble upon this thin book and thought it might be useful for future beading experiments. At the same library I once borrowed a jewellery-making book which included some less than conventional woven projects using e.g. leather cord, shards of bricks (!) and copper wire. It was called Smycka dig, out of print since ages. On of the co-authors also wrote this book with even more unconventional materials called Väv som aldrig förr.

As for books to buy, there aren't really many on my wishlist at the moment. Mostly find inspiration online and techniques either online, in my library book or through trial and error. I've thought about Time to Weave as works like this one (page 7 of the preview, sorry found no diret link) really catches my eye and is about the modern, non-traditional but still simple weaving I could see myself doing. As for beading on a loom, I've looked at Alexandra Kidd's book a few times because it includes weaving with not just seeds (love the texture in the bag on the cover), but never figured out if I'd find it worth the money or not.

But for me, experimenting with weaving is not about either doing a woven piece or do bead looming, it's also about adding it to the things I want to try in order to create fun and original surfaces for my bead (and thread) embroidery. Having a limited fabric stash, I've though about painting, dyeing (scratched that out and went back to painting), adding texture like this or this, making tissue paper fabrics or napkin decoupage on fabric, doing something cool like this -- or weave ribbon/fabric strips like this.

But, all urges to weave aside, I'll probably first and foremost always be an admirer of the work made by others. And I hope to always be able to see beauty and admire the invention of weaving even in the most mundane of everyday objects. Weaving as the magic that turns threads, birch bark strips, straws, rags, ribbons and everything else into everything from useful and essential objects to pure eye-candy artwork.

Challenge of travel: Welcome to Bjäre!

Well, I didn't think I'd be able to make it in time with everything that's happened. However, Uggi (that's our youngest cat, who got very ill last weekend for those of you that don't follow my blog) is recovering fast and it's given me a big burst of energy. Or perhaps rather of happiness and relief, which could be turned into creative energy. So here it, my Challenge of Travel reveal!

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First of all, before I forget, I must thank our hostess, Erin, for this fab challenge! Even when so much else took all my time and energy, I never wanted to give up on this challenge as it was so fun to work on. The 2nd Annual Challenge of Travel, which is themed Staycation, is a blog hop. To find links to all participants' reveals, please check out our hostess reveal post HERE.


This stop on the hop is an hommage to my hembygd (a word that has no direct english equivalent I can think of, but it's the area where you grew up and/or live and feel a connection to, the place where your roots are). I grew up -- and now live -- in a small hamlet located in the middle of Bjäre. A place you can see every time you visit my blog as the blog header features a view from home. Bjäre is a peninsula in the northwestern corner of the southern-most province in Sweden, Skåne (also known by it's latin name Scania) -- a province once called "a piece of the Continent attached to Sweden".

Making a long story short, the province became swedish in 1658 after long having been part of eastern Denmark. Half of Skåne sits on limestone bedrock, which makes it more like the countries of the Continent than of Sweden, which partially explains the quote above. We also have a distinct dialect and our own red-and-yellow flag. I guess we are also known for affluent farmland and the food. There are many regional specialities such as luad ål (smoked eel), äggakaga (a thick panecake-y thing served with lingonberry jam and bacon), skånsk äblakaga (apple pie), spickeskinka (dry-salted and cold smoked ham), kavring (sweet rye bread), mårtensgås (goose dinner on St Martin's day), spiddekaga (can't translate, please see Wikipedia for explanation), rabbemos (mashed rutabaga/swede and potato) etc. An old scanian saying goes "goen mad, möen mad og mad i rättan ti" ("good food, a lot of food and food at the right time").

Bjäre is part of what one scholar dubbed risbygden, a region "between the plough and the forest" ("mellan plogen och skogen") with a variegated nature and a landscape characterized by smallholdings. To the south of Bjäre is a second peninsula, Kullen, which you can see as a blue mountain ridge in the above photo, separated from Bjäre by the Skälderviken bay. Just off the the western Bjäre coast, by Torekov, is the island of Hallands Väderö placed in the sea called Kattegatt (which catlovers might be interested in learning that it is thought to mean "cat hole" or "cat gate" in dutch because it was so narrow it was difficult to navigate through). Like most of the Bjäre coastline, Väderön is a nature reserve.

In the north, you can see the ever present Hallandsåsen ridge and the northern half of Bjäre is characterized by the hilly terrain created by the ridge as it stretches from the inland out towards Hovs Hallar (the place where the knight plays chess with Death in Ingemar Bergman's film The Seventh Seal). The other half is more of a flat terrain spreading towards the sea. The two most famous towns here are the market town of Båstad and the former fishing village of Torekov (known locally as Torke).

I will however not dwell there, both as the places are already wellknown and packed with tourists and as they're too posh for a country girl like me. Well, at least they can be very posh during summer. No, despite interesting things I could tell (the attempted russian invasion of Båstad 1788, the tennis and Mr G, ridiculous upper-class party activities like vaskning, the Torekov compromise that created our current constitution, the first seaside resorts etc etc), I want to focus on the little hamlets and villages around where I live. The real countryside with hamlets, small-scale fields, grazing cows, bronze age burial mounds, small forests, strandängar, trails for ramblers, farm shops, miles of 19th century stone walls, local football fields, potato fields, art exhibits -- and a clog factory (yes, I did forget the golf courses on purpose). And trolls, you can't forget the trolls.

But first, let's place Bjäre and my hamlet of Svenstad on the map.

Click for a close up. Photo taken during spring, which explains this common sight.

 
If you want to check out Bjäre on Google Maps, here's a link to get you started.

The place marked on the first two maps is our hamlet. Svenstad is a very small hamlet, has been since it was depopulated during the danish-swedish wars (over provinces like Skåne) in the 17th century. There is however one name that has made this hamlet a bit better known than most others of its size: world famous opera singer and hovsångerska -- and cat lover -- Birgit Nilsson. Birgit and her husband Bertil were occasionally our neighbours as it was her she grew up on a farm she later inherited.  After her death, the work to turn her family home into a museum started and our road was renamed after her. So one of our nearest neighbours are now the Birgit Nilsson Museum.

For a virtual view of the museum (and Svenstad), you can go to the street view at Google Maps here. A map of and info on the ancient monuments and historical relics -- mounds, stone carvings, culturally important buildings -- can be found on the Fornsök map at The Swedish National Heritage Board (Riksantikvarieämbetet) website. It's in swedish only, though.

Of cause, while this post is turning into a very long one, I still can't tell you all about Bjäre. If you're more interested, there are are few tourist websites for Båstad/Bjäre and Skåne. The official tourist website for Bjäre is Bastad.com and the official one for Skåne is Visit Skåne. Hallands väderö has its own website here while Torekov has a site in swedish here. If you're interested in hiking/rambling, there is a trail throughout the province called Skåneleden, which you can read about here. Apart from it there are several shorter, local trails. On Bjäre, it follows the coastline and there are two paths leading over the Hallandsåsen ridge towards the southern coasst. Upplev Bjäre is another tourist website, but it's in swedish only, but offer translations via Google Translate (in other words: do check it out, but don't expect great translations). The Birgit Nilsson website also have a few tips on this page, including the linen weaving mill in Boarp and Märta Måås-Fjetterström's studio in Båstad.

If you're interested in guided tours or hikes, there are many to be offered (though I'm not sure how many have english-speaking guides). Interested in local produce? So called "farm tourism" is booming at the moment and you can experience everything from farmer's markets and annual events (Day of the potato most notable here on Bjäre) to kosläpp (popular family event when the cows are let out on the pastures after a winter indoors) and culinary food hikes though the landscape. Completed with farm shops, farm cafés and countryside B&Bs. You can even pay for the opportunity to plant/set or harvest potatoes! Love of gardening? For example  Din Trädgård offer no less than four tours of private gardens and nurseries in Northwestern Skåne: Höstrundan ("the autumn tour"), Rosrundan ("the rose tour"), Månskensrundan ("the moonshine tour" visiting lit up gardens on an october evening) and Trädgårdsrundan ("the garden tour"). History and archaeology buff? Local societies like Föreningen Gamla Båstad and Bjäre arkeologivänner sometimes do guided tours in or around Båstad, talking about history and ancient monuments respectively. Naturskyddsföreningen do nature hikes, but I'm not sure if they're for members only or not. The tourist centres can also provide guide books and maps for your own explorations.

Oh, and by the way: Don't forget the artisan fair in Båstad, Hantverksmässan! An annual show during the last weekend of July where you sometimes even find a lampwork bead artist or two, but most of all handmade jewellery and kinds of other art and craft products from artists all over the country.

The most important question, then: are there any bead shops? Well, not exactly on Bjäre, but there are a few craft and bead shops nearby. On Bjäre you can find a craft/embroidery/yarn shop in Båstad and two fabric shops in Förslöv unless I'm mistaken. As for bead shops and craft shops with a bead range, I refer you to my website Svenska Pärlbutiker where you'll find a map of such shops in Sweden. 

For loads of photos of Bjäre -- Svenstad in particular -- please see the landscape photos label on this blog (you might have to scroll through a few pages to find the really good photos...). And for many more photos of the province of Skåne in general -- from the Turning Torso in Malmö to the iconic beech forests and yellow rapefields, from reconstructed viking cottages to the castles of the old nobility, from apple orchards to university buildings  -- please see my Skåne - Scania pinboard:

So from all this, where did I draw inspiration for my creation? For me, most of the things I love about Bjäre and Svenstad revolve around the nature, coastline, agriculture (cows, fields, farms, farmer families) and cultural history. Places like the burial mounds, which are ever present on the peninsula, often with troll legends attached to them , and Drottninghall with its prehistoric stone carvings shrouded in local folklore and overlooking Bjäre, Skälderviken bay and beyond that Kullen. I've written a few posts on local lore, from trolls to princess saints, which you can find here.

For the tourists, Bjäre and places like Torekov, Kattvik, Stora Hult and Båstad are places of summer and sunshine. Picturesque places of vacations. They only see one aspect of the peninsula. I see it and love it around the year. Love the changes in the landscape as summer turns into autumn, autumn turns into winter and winter turns into spring. For me, images like these are just as much my idea of Bjäre as a summer beach. Perhaps even more as that tourist summer thing is so ephemeral. The real Bjäre is easier to see once the tourists have returned home.

Now, this necklace didn't turn out at all like I wanted it to, but still showing it as it was the first idea I got. I wanted to use this hand-dyed silk thread for an autumnal design inspired by the apple orchards in Kattvik (which means "cat bay", by the way) and Båstad. Don't know if more than the one in Kattvik produce apples commercially, the rest are sadly abandoned -- on turned into a golf course. It also echoes of our own apple trees, many of which my dad has grown from seeds.

The bamboo charm is also a nod to our own garden -- I love bamboo and grew up with a couple of plants around the farm.

The second piece is also all about the flora. I chose the teal flower as it reminds me of the gardens, parks and farmland wrapped in mist in the late autumn when not much colour remains as the flowers wilt, but there's still a somewhat melancholic, serene beauty. Dew and mist drifting inland from the cold sea.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention the connection to the seaside park/public gardens of Norrvikens trädgårdar what with the sea-colour flower and beads. Norrviken have had some tough years, but in 2006 it won the award of most beautiful park in Sweden and went on to compete over the title of most beautiful in Europe, ending up in second place.

A small pic of its full length.

Then I struggled to create something with bronze. I have to include bronze as the bronze age is always just above or below the ground level here. But what to do? Not much bronze in my stash right now (had forgotten about a couple of bronze clay components I won ages ago), nothing but some round tags. But then this morning I got an idea and layered them with coloured copper tags on a flexible rubber bangle. Three charms on one bracelet, which might become three bangles with one charm each if I get more of those rubber bracelets.

As everything else is filled with symbolism, this got one too, apart from the bronze age heritage: the modern, sleek style and the colours stand for all our local artists (catlover? Check out the couple Ulla & Gustav Kraitz!). There's an annual konstrunda in Northwestern Skåne, an event where local artists open up their studios for the public, who will go around a route visiting as few or as many artists as they want. All artists are also represented in a collective exhibition in addition to the open studios. Arts represented include painting, graphics, fiber arts, sculpture, silversmithing, glass, photography etc. In 2013 148 artists were represented, at least 20 being in Bjäre as you can see in this map.

This piece isn't actually a challenge piece, it's just a test of my new Pébéo Fantasy paint, but I thought the result looked like one of our beaches on a sunny summer's day so it was a good fit here now that the test coincided with the challenge. The base is a 2x2 cm glass mosaic tile. I'll soon do a post on my first Pébéo experiments, which will include a close-up of this one.

Last but not least, the pièce de résistance. It took me a long while to come up with making this. I wanted to do something related to the stories I told earlier, the local legends and tales about Saint Tora, the stones in Hov, the trolls and Drottninghall. After a lot of thought, it struck me that a gold crown would be a possible common denominator: Tora is often depicted wearing a crown since the legends often portrait her as a princess, some of the stories about Drottninghall involve a queen and the trolls were well known for their treasures, which must've included crowns. Add to that my penchant for bridal crowns and I just had to give it a go.
 
It was a long time since I last made a crown and I'm afraid it shows, just as well as it shows that I just whipped this thing together yesterday, but I hope you still like it a little.

It wasn't my intention, but I discovered that it ended up being the same colours as our provincial flag, red (garnet) and yellow (brass)! Which perhaps was very fitting.

And so we come to the end. I hope you enjoyed my introduction to Bjäre, the place where I grew up and the place where I now once again live. Thank you for stopping by, taking the time to read and/or check out at my challenge creations!

I'm going to wrap up this long, long post the same way I started it:  

Welcome to Bjäre!

The legend of saint Tora

S:ta Thoras sten. Photo by Yabosid [via Flickr.com]. License: Creative Commons by-sa 2.0

On the pebbled beach in Torekov, you can see this boulder, a glacial erratic. It looks like many other boulder and it's not even impressively big. it does, however, has an interesting story attached to it. It's not a "jättekast" (a name for glacial erratics in general, but boulders said to have been thrown by a giant in particular -- compare with the Hov legend.), but a stone infused with a legend of saints.

Like with my last post on local lore, this is a tad long and requires a break. Be sure to click the "Read more" below for the whole story of the girl who became the symbol for the Bjäre peninsula.

A tale of trolls

Having written about the stones in Hov, the second and most important story I want to tell is the story of the trolls and mounds, which I've alluded to in a couple of blog posts (e.g. here) but never really told the whole story about. As it's a really long post, I've added a break so be sure to click below to read the whole tale of the trolls.

The story of the giant and the church bells in Hov

I thought I was going to write a little about Bjäre and more specifically about the old stories surrounding different places here on the peninsula before the Challenge of Travel reveal. Sort of mention a few things I don't have room to talk about in the reveal post and created a wider picture of some of my inspiration sources. The first legend I wanted to write about is the story of the stones and the church in Hov.

Hov is a village I've often passed by, stopped by or just taken photos of (if you see a photo with a church in the background on this blog, it'll most likely be the church in Hov). It's situated when the road between Torekov and Båstad meets the road from Västra Karup, which in the other direction continues south through Grevie and Förslöv. If you arrive at Hov from the west, from Torekov, the first thing you'll see is  the church on the hill and in front of it the two standing stones (bautastenar, menhirs, liths) just outside the church wall. The two stones are the most visible markers of the old bronze age/iron age gravefield, indicating the ritual importance of the place as a place of worship and counsels long before the arrival of christianity.  People have been buried here continuously for almost 4000 years.

The iconic silhouette dominating the landscape can be seen in the necklace above with the stone setting, standing stones and the burial mound Klockarehögen in the fourground and the church bell tower in the background.

Photo by Guillaume Baviere via Flickr.com. License: Creative Commons CC BY 2.0

 
Anyway, of cause there's a story behind these ancient monuments. It's a classic tale, really, about a giant who couldn't stand the sound of the church bells. The giants and trolls inhabited the lands long before the humans came along, but they seemed to be more at peace before christianity arrived. In fact, it seems like the giants emigrated after the churches came as they simply couldn't stand these new intruders. Many were the trolls and giants that suffered in the new times, but the toll was harder on the giants that on the trolls (provided we make a clear difference between the two, which isn't easily done).

After the first church was built in Hov -- the one you see in the pendant is the current 19th century church -- and the church bells began to ring life got hard for the giant woman living on Kullaberg on the neighbouring Kullen peninsula. The bells caused her ears and head to ache, non-christians being especially susceptible to anything christian -- you might even say they were allergic to things like bell ringing, holy water and crosses. Soon she got so mad at this horrible new thing that she picked up a stone and, using her garter as a sling, hurled it at the church across the Skälderviken bay. But, alas, as in all these stories about giants and churches, the stone landed just before hitting the church. Infuriated, she tried again, but this time too, she missed her marks. The magic powers of the church were stronger than her muscle power. In the end, she did like so many of her peers and moved to a more secluded place, untouched by christianity, where she could live her life in peace, far from any ache-inducing church bells.

Hov and Hov's church seen from Svenstad