Ulla Vilhelmina Schumacher was born in 1918 to a prosperous middle-class family in Stockholm. She studied drawing and painting for several years after her primary schooling attending a school run by one Otte Sköld, who later became head of Sweden’s Nationalmuseum.  Deciding she wanted to go into textile work, she then spent two years training at the Teckniska Skolan (Stockholm’s leading design school, later called Konstfack), apparently gaining a firm grounding in weaving, embroidery, and tapestry work.   With the world at war, she could hardly have picked a worse time to start a car ..read more

I wish all of you joy in your families and communities this Christmas and New Year, but am also bruised by the violent genocide in Gaza and find it hard to wish anyone “happy” anything while this is going on. I have chosen to mark this time of this year with this rya rug, designed by Edna Martin in the 1950s, probably for Svensk Hemskjöld which draws on the format of many traditional middle eastern small pile rugs, with images of animals and house shapes. I looked for a rug with red, green, black and white of the Palestinian flag but realized that the point was NOT to make a cozy version of s ..read more

Working in Våsterbotten, one of the most northern Swedish provinces, from the 1960s-through to the 1990s, Margit Westin designed textiles for many churches around Umeå.  Perhaps paradoxically, her textile work seems to embody the spirit of the wild fresh nature that defines that north country and yet at the same time, with its exuberant delight in bright color, seems to push back the whiteness and the long dark of that region.   Westin designed many priests’ garments, called chasubles (“mässhaker,” in Swedish), and liturgical textiles used for church services and ceremonies. Technica ..read more

Having built a modest modern home in a village just outside Järvsö, in Gavelborg county in north central Sweden with her husband in 1956, Kerstin Ekengren became fully established in her new home studio during the next two decades. What’s more, she had a secure relationship with a handweaving studio just a few miles away, who could execute both large and smaller work for her. This post will look at a major piece of weaving she designed during this period, a large, intricate and colorful pile rug, as well as several smaller pieces she did in 1970 in a different style and darker palette . Kerst ..read more

This image of a Christmas tree by a Swedish designer I cannot identify, in slightly atypical but energetic colors and with a bit of damage to it (top and fringe)– feels just about right for me as a celebration of Christmas on my blog this year! I wish you all a joyful and peaceful 2023 with a renewed sense of freshness and hope! On my part, I look forward to returning to this blog in the new year, and filling in with new discoveries and finds, after finally (!) completing a major renovation (rebuild) of a family house in Maine. Having been unable to find the energy and time to devote to resea ..read more

God Jul, or Merry Christmas! This year’s Christmas image, of a good-sized rya rug (140 x 200 cm, or about 55 x 79 inches) was designed and woven in 1950 and presented to the Nordiska Museum in Stockholm by the designer, INGRID SKERFE-NILSSON. I looked at some of the images below before, in my initial post on Skerfe-Nilsson in 2017, a talented and enterprising designer working in Uppsala, who rode the mid-century wave of interest in rya rugs to considerable success. Nilsson’s interest in traditional 18th- and 19th-century rya from the Uppsala area led her to design for the Uppsala County Crafts ..read more

Coming up for auction in Stockholm on May 10 at Bukowskis auction house is a major piece of weaving by Swedish designer, Marianne Richter. This carpet , made of knotted pile (“flossa” in Swedish) was designed in 1959, and woven by the Märta Måås-Fjetterstöm workshop in Bastad. Marianne Richter, Fläkten knotted pile rug (flossa), 367-372 x 497-498.5 cm, designed in1959, and woven by the Märta Måås-Fjetterström workshop in Bastad. The rug is signed AB MMF and MR. To be auctioned at the Bukowskis Modern Art and Design Auction, May 10-11. All photos of this rug are courtesy of Bukowskis. The name ..read more

One of the continuing puzzles to me, in looking at Swedish mid-century rugs, is how little they seem to have penetrated the American market during the 1950s and 60s. There were exhibitions of Swedish craft at American museums from the 1920s on, and, Sweden showed rugs by some of its best designers at the 1959 New York Worlds Fair. Several individuals, often of Swedish descent, build significant collections of Swedish rugs. But looking at American decorating and architectural magazines of the period, I am struck at the near-total absence of these rugs in magazine images. There seem to be a numb ..read more

Twigs and stars and colors woven together– what a joyful celebration of this time of year! When the trees are bare, and we all need a little color, this small tapestry by Barbro Nilsson, offers a wonderful exploration of color and form. Measuring only about 18″ x 24″, it is a variant in a series of small weavings of twigs and leaves designed around 1957. In Swedish, these small weavings are called “bonad” or “vävnad,” generally designed as small wall-hangings, though frequently made into cushions as well. Nilsson was the masterful Swedish weaver who in 1941 succeeded Märta Måås-Fjetterström to ..read more

The first part of this post looked at several of the flat-weave rugs, called rölakan in Swedish, designed by this very prolific mid-century designer, Ingegerd Silow. During the first part of her career, Silow drew on traditional Swedish textile motifs, but found creative ways to inflate sizes, change colors, and generally oomph these forms into something much more contemporary. These rugs were produced in great quantity— in both a range of sizes and colors— by several Swedish companies, notably Axeco AB and Eric Ewers AB, and proved extremely attractive to young Swedes moving into the new hous ..read more