Ok, well, I got distracted! The following is from Wednesday, and I’ll try to add something later to catch up to today.

Well, it’s the final evening here at Sätergläntan, and I’m sad to see an end to our week in the country. We leave tomorrow for Falun and the Dalarna Museum (where there are a huge number of two-end knitted items), and then on to Uppsala and the Midsummer festival. Friday will be the summer solstice, and here it will be light for 24 hours. I hear that it’s quite the celebration, and that it can get pretty crazy in places. We are looking forward to the folk music and dancing, and the chance to watch a completely different cultural experience.

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Last week I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Katarina Segerbrand, a designer well-known in Scandanavia who has a unique and wide-ranging portfolio. I discovered some of her sweater designs before leaving the States, and was really impressed with her very fresh take on stranded knitting. When I got to her studio, however, I was just blown away by some of the things she is doing with machine knitting. We are looking at a wrap she made of felted cables, and it is an amazing piece. She has been doing lots of experimental work and I’m really looking forward to seeing where it takes her. While this piece is truly amazing and exceedingly complex, I also fell in love with some very simple designs she had done with panels of plain knitting separated by long floats.

I look forward to visiting Katarina again, and hopefully at a time where I can peek in on the class she is teaching at the arts college in Boras, near the west coast of Sweden. Her class is in the techniques of machine knitting, and I’d love to be a student there. In seven sessions she takes them from threading the machine to producing literally hundreds of swatches featuring ever complex fiber manipulation (I’m picturing hundreds of hours of homework!)