sightseeing

Unwinding

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Hello there! Here, in the Netherlands, many people take some time off work in the last week of April and the first week of May. With most schools closed, King’s Day on April 27th and Liberation Day on May 5th, it is a time for going to festivals or travelling. While everybody seemed to be having a great time, I was feeling grumpy. Like, everybody is having fun but me. Was I envious?

Well, yes and no. When I saw the crowds in the cities and at the airport on tv, I was happy I wasn’t among them. I didn’t mind missing out on the big events and didn’t particularly want to travel either. What I did want was some time to unwind, though. Only on a much smaller scale. So that’s what I’ve been doing over the past couple of weeks, and I’d like to share some of it with you.

One thing I’ve been doing is literally unwinding and re-winding yarn using my nøstepinne.

It’s a totally unnecessary thing to do, but for me very relaxing. Seeing a mini-skein or an unattractive looking leftover bit of sock yarn transform into a perfect little ball with a hole in the middle is just so satisfying.

Going for a walk or cycling are other great ways for me to unwind. (Thank you for joining me on last week’s wood anemone walk – I really appreciate your comments. Knowing that you are there and enjoy some of the same things inspires me to keep blogging.) We are very fortunate in where we live. Hopping onto my bicycle, I’m here in three minutes:

And even closer to home, I’ve been pottering around the garden, doing some weeding and taking a few photographs. In our herb patch, I found a blackbird’s egg – unfortunately not hatched.

(We’ve also found shells of eggs that did hatch, so not to worry.) Looking at flowers through the lens of my camera, I forget everything else.

Most of the things I did to unwind were close to home (or even at home) and took just a few minutes to an hour at most. But we also took an entire day off to visit a fair at Middachten Castle.

My husband lived close to the castle as a child and our daughter lived almost next-door for several years, so it feels a bit like home to us. Although it is a beautiful place, I’m glad it isn’t really our home, to be honest. I’d feel totally lost in a big place like this, and think of all the work involved! The house and gardens are closed until June, but just looking at them from the outside was still enjoyable.

The fair we’d come for was rather disappointing. I’d hoped to be able to buy a few gifts at the stalls, but didn’t see anything special. Apart from some spectacular bulbs of different varieties of garlic, that is.

But a bunch of garlic as a gift for a 20-year-old niece? Not, not quite what I was looking for. Fortunately we had enough time left to visit a few shops in nearby Zutphen. Ah, it’s such a lovely city – I’ll take you there for a longer visit again some other time. (An earlier post about it can be read here.)

I also spent quite a bit of time unwinding with my Seventh Heaven Scarf. It’s growing much faster than I thought. After the greens, I’m now deep into the blues (literally – after all the unwinding any figurative blues have lifted), knitting up some of my small nøstepinne-wound balls of yarn.

Well, that’s it for today. I hope you can find some time to unwind in your days, too, and hope to see you again next week!

Giethoorn Embroidery Samplers

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Hello!

Today, I’m taking you to the nearby village of Giethoorn again. We’ve visited several times before (here, here and here). Later in the year it’ll be teeming with tourists, but not yet.

Most cafés and shops are still closed. The museum is open, though, and that’s what matters because we’re here for the Embroidery Sampler Exhibition. I did not count them, but I think there are at least 40 and maybe even 50 local samplers on display, from 19th century ones to much more recent examples, and from simple school samplers…

… to very elaborate ones, using other embroidery techniques besides cross stitch as well. Here is one of those, with beautiful open seaming.

What strikes me in the Giethoorn embroidery samplers is that many of them are very personal, especially the later ones. Not just mentioning names and birth dates, but much more. Take the one below – there’s a whole life there: marriage, children, work, wartime memories, school and hobbies.

One of the embroiderers also seems to be a knitter. Interestingly, she doesn’t use cross stitch.

What I love most about the Giethoorn embroidery samplers is their local flavour. It’s not just that the word Giethoorn is embroidered on them, but they also have pictures of the traditional boats and the typical high bridges.

In the old centre, almost every house has its own bridge.

Some of the embroiderers have also included their homes in their samplers, in several cases even with the house number. Here is number 56.

I thought it would be fun to try and find the real house. It turned out to be close to the museum. The embroiderer has taken some artistic liberty with the number of windows, but you’ll recognize it straightaway.

Apart from this temporary embroidery exhibition, the museum shows us what life was like in Giethoorn around a century ago. Here is the front of the museum on one of the samplers.

Everything is there: the steps leading up to the front door, the chimney, the dormer window with its pointy top, the shutters and even the little window over the front door.

The Giethoorn sampler exhibition can be visited through mid-May. Information about the museum can be found on the museum website. For those of you living too far away, I hope you’ve enjoyed your virtual visit. For my Dutch readers: echt een bezoekje waard!

Looking for Something Simple

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Hello!

Drawing up my knitting wish list for 2023, I forgot one thing. There is lots of interest in it: Norwegian knitting, design projects, challenging socks etc. What I didn’t think of at the time was that I also need something simple alongside.

At the moment a pair of simple socks in a plain, solid navy blue is fulfilling this role. The only interesting thing about them is that they’re from a yarn I’ve never used before – Lamana ‘Merida’.

When these are finished I’d like to start on a simple wrap/scarf/stole again. Something endlessly rhythmic and soothing. Something like this huge stole in a wide knit-and-purl rib I knit several years ago (blog post here):

Something like this only slightly smaller Striped Linen Stitch Wrap I’ve enjoyed knitting so much (blogged about here):

In short, I am looking for something utterly simple – no shaping, no seaming, no complicated stitch patterns – that will take a long time to knit. But what? I thought a visit to my nearest serious yarn shop might help me find the answer. It is in the Frisian town of Joure, a 20-minute drive from our home.

Joure isn’t the first place that would come to mind if people from elsewhere were to ask me what to visit in this region. It is just a nice, ordinary town, but it does have a few lovely spots and buildings as well as an interesting-looking museum (that I have yet to visit).

Joure also has a lively shopping street, although it struck me this time that here, too, as in so many other towns there are quite a few empty shops. Brick-and-mortar shops seem to be struggling everywhere. Strolling through the town centre is still very enjoyable, though.

And here we are at the yarn shop – Ajoure. There is a spinning wheel and some unspun and undyed wool in the window.

And inside there are walls, tables, cupboards, boxes and baskets filled with yarn, yarn, yarn and more yarn.

Many beautiful and expensive yarns, and also many more ordinary and affordable ones. And yet I don’t find what I am looking for. Not the shop’s fault – it’s just me being vague and indecisive. I don’t consider my visit fruitless, though. I’ve seen several yarns I’ll keep in mind for future projects, just spending some time in Joure was lovely, and I also picked up a leaflet telling me that the fabulous wool and sheep festival Joure onder de wol will be held again this year, on Saturday May 13th. If you don’t live too far away, that’s really something to look forward to.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep looking for something simple to knit. Bye for now and hope to see you again soon!

PS. And what about the people at the top of this post? Why are they standing there in the middle of Joure’s shopping street, gazing up at the sky? Are they looking for inspiration, too? Well, actually they are not gazing up at the sky, but at this:

The recently restored church steeple from 1628.

Happy 2023!

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Gelukkig Nieuwjaar! May 2023 be filled with happiness for you and your loved ones. I hope you’ve had a great time over the Holidays and a good start to the New Year.

As for me, I spent part of the last day of the old year baking a big batch of knieperties (recipe here).

Keeping a few back for ourselves, I filled several bags with knieperties, closed them with cheerful ribbons, put them in a basket and distributed them among our neighbours. We don’t see much of each other at this time of the year, and it was nice to catch up on their news.

In exchange for the knieperties, some of them gave us home-made oliebollen and appelflappen. Yum!

When the clock struck 12 and the fireworks started, it was 15 ˚C (32 ˚F) – a nice temperature for a sunny day in May, not the middle of a night in December! Reading about the terrible snow storms and torrential rain some of you have had, I wish things could have been distributed a bit more evenly across the globe. I hope all is more or less back to normal now where you live.

Our Holiday break was uneventful, and I’ve been knitting quite a bit, finishing the Advent calendar mittens.

They were getting neater and neater as I went along – practice makes perfect (or at least improves skills). Taken together the backs make a lovely sampler of Norwegian colourwork that could be used for all kinds of other projects (description of how to download the pattern at the end of this post).

I’ve put them away now, moth-free in plastic, and made notes in my planner here and there to remind me of finding small gifts, poems and quotes to put inside. And especially to remind me of gifting them before December 1, 2023.

The life-size mittens I’ve also been knitting were less of a success, turning out a wee bit too small, and will have to be re-knit. More about those if/when I’ve found the courage to start anew.

Beside a few walks and a great family get-together, we also enjoyed a concert of a group of midwinter horn blowers. They called it An Ode to Peace through Connection.

It was great fun, seeing and hearing these strange traditional wooden horns, made by the players themselves.

The concert lasted all of 15 minutes, with each of the players doing a solo first, and finally all of them ‘making a lot of noise together’, as they themselves put it. The group has members aged from 7 to 70+ and each player has their own technique, resting the end of the horn on the ground or holding it high up in the air.

They’re an elusive bunch, these people, playing their horns from late November through the first week of January in a dozen or so villages around the area. Excepting this afternoon concert, you never know where they will pop up. Their announcements say: You’re most likely to hear us somewhere around 6 pm.

Did you notice the 2023 from buttons at the top? Well, I’ve also been rummaging through my button box. If I can get my act together, I’ll tell you more about that next week. Hope to see you then!

PS. If you’d like to hear the weird and wonderful sound of midwinter horns, there is a video on YouTube here. This isn’t ‘our’ group, but the sound is similar.

Nearly Finished

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Hello, and welcome to my last blog post for 2022. While I am typing this, the Christmas stollen my husband has baked is cooling on a wire rack in the kitchen, filling the house with its delicious warm smell.

We do not celebrate Christmas in a big way, but there are certain traditions we hold dear. Like the above stollen, a Christmas tree with the same baubles every year, and a Christmas dinner prepared and shared with love and attention.

We also enjoy visiting a Christmas market in Germany when we can. So on a frosty morning, just before the sun came up, we set off for Münster.

On the way there, I knit a few rows on a simple sock in a lovely hand-painted yarn, the only suitable knitting project to take along – everything else was either too complicated or nearly finished.

Actually there isn’t a Christmas market in Münster but six, on various squares around the beautiful old city centre.

They are all slightly different. Some are more food-oriented, some more about gifts and handmade things. And one small new one was focused on organic, sustainable and fair-trade products. Even the mulled wine was certified organic.

As our gift-giving moment is already behind us, we didn’t need to shop for gifts and were free to stroll around, enjoy the sights and each other’s company, and have a bite to eat here and there. I love the traditional hot and golden Reibekuchen mit Apfelmus (potato fritters with apple sauce).

I also quickly popped into the yarn shop in the city centre, thinking it might be nice to write about, but popped out just as quickly – nothing to write home about there. Well, never mind, there was enough to enjoy without yarn.

To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this time of the year. I really love Christmas. And no matter what, how, or where we’re celebrating, I think we can all do with a message of peace and light.

But I can also relate to newspaper columnist Doortje Smithuijsen, who recently wrote, ‘… it’s the time of year again when we feel that at the end of the month the world is coming to an end – the time when everything needs to be finished NOW […] The time of year when you’re feeling vulnerable, looking for something to hold on to.’ (De Volkskrant, V2, 15 December 2022, my translation).

Unlike Doortje, I’m not joining MyInnerHealthClub. I don’t need to look far for something to hold on to – I have my knitting needles. Like her, I feel the urge to finish things, and I try to have all my knitting projects finished before the end of the year/world. My navy blue cardigan is nearly finished.

I also hope to finish my Advent calendar mittens soon. I am really, really enjoying knitting these, and if the world doesn’t stop turning at 12 pm on December 31, I’d love to do more Norwegian knitting in the new year.

I’d also love to knit more for our grandson, more socks (not just simple ones) and more things designed by myself, and to write about what I’m learning along the way. I won’t be able to finish my new shawl pattern before the year is out, but I’ve already wound the yarn for the final version. I hope to be able to tell you more about it in January or February.

I’m taking a break from blogging now to spend time with my loved ones, knit, read and go for walks. Thank you so much for reading my blog over the past year. It’s been lovely hearing from some of you now and then. I hope to ‘see’ you again in 2023, and wish you and yours a happy and relaxing festive season!

Gables

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Hello!

Today, I thought I’d treat you to some knitted gables as well as some real ones. From three skeins of fingering-weight merino non-superwash yarn I’ve knit another Thús 2. Casting on 119 stitches, I made it wider than in the pattern. Then I knit, knit, knit, and knit, row after row of houses, making it longer than the original too, ending up with a 51cm/20” by 2.14m/84¼” wrap. Here you can see how big it is:

I like wearing it like this, with the ends criss-crossed:

Or wrapped around my neck once and knotted:

The gables in my wrap are very simple, rather like the gable of our own home only with an extra pair of windows.

Far simpler than the many beautiful and interesting gables we saw during a visit to the Frisian city of Bolsward in August. There were stepped gables, like this one with its decorative anchor plates and a man’s and a woman’s head above the first-floor windows:

The stepped gable from 1741 below, with a pair of scissors in the centre, must have belonged to a tailor once.

There were simple bell gables:

And ornate ones, with swags and frills everywhere:

As well as interesting and fancy gables that seem more modern to me (but I am not knowledgeable enough to tell you from what period or style this one is) :

It was fun walking along the canals wearing how-many-different-gables-can-I-find glasses.

Well, back to my own simple, hand knit gables. If you’d like to copy them, my Ravelry notes can be found here.

There are other knits on my needles now – a simple navy blue cardigan for everyday wear, a jacket for our grandson, swatches for a new design of my own and a pair of mittens for a gift. More about those when I’m a little further along. I hope you have enough to occupy your hands, too. Because, what can be nicer than spending the darkening evenings knitting?

Lilla Ull Huset

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Hello!

Sit down and enjoy the moment, the wooden sign at the top says in German. It was placed behind a stone bench along a hiking trail in Das Bergische Land, an area about 45 km east of Köln/Cologne. We’ve just spent a week there, and I have so much to show and tell, especially for the knitters among you. I hope you have some time to sit down and enjoy this moment at your computer, or in a lazy chair with your tablet or mobile.

The people we rented our apartment from had the most amazing garden. It was private…

… but we were allowed to spend as much time in it as we liked. This is a view of the garden from the veranda at the top:

There was a woodland walk, a vegetable and herb garden, fruit trees, roses, herbaceous borders and several photogenic summerhouses and sheds.

So romantic! We didn’t spend the entire week in that beautiful garden, though. Part of our week was spent visiting friends and relatives, chatting and sampling some utterly delicious cakes.

And to burn all those calories off, we also spent several days hiking. Compared to our flat Dutch country, it’s quite a mountainous area, although it doesn’t show much in this picture.

One of our walks was a themed one around Fachwerkhäuser. How I love those beautiful timber-framed buildings. I could fill an entire post with the pictures I’ve taken of them alone and have had a hard time choosing just one.

The first couple of days were warm and sunny, but then the weather changed (sneaking in one more Fachwerkhaus here).

And on a very, very wet day, we decided to go shopping in the town of Gummersbach.

I’d googled a bit beforehand and discovered a yarn shop there called Lilla Ull Huset, specializing in Scandinavian knitting yarns.

It is a veritable Valhalla for knitters, with yarns from Danish Isager, Holst and Geilsk, Norwegian Sandnes, Swedish Ullcentrum Öland, Islandic Istex Lopi and more. I’m adding as many links as I can, so that anyone who wants to can spend even more time drooling over lovely yarns and patterns.

This is a close-up of the Isager section:

And this simple yet stylish striped scarf was knit from a combination of their yarns.

There were quite a few knitted sweaters, scarves and shawls to inspire visitors. This is a soft and cosy Sandnes one – isn’t it fun how they styled it with those over-the-top pearl necklaces?

Below right is Christel Seyfarth’s Mongolia Shawl. And left Isager’s sweater Clouds of Sils Maria.

The sweater is a wonderful Scandinavian amalgam, designed by Danish Marianne Isager, with an Icelandic yoke, and knit for the most part in Geilsk Tweed. I’d love to knit it, especially in this tweedy yarn.

There was also a great selection of books. The entire series of those beautiful Norwegian Kofteboken, many Isager books and also books by designers I’d never heard of, like Susie Haumann, Ditte Larsen and Annette Danielsen.

So, did we drive home with a boot filled with enough yarn to cover all my loved ones in knitting from head to toe? It was tempting, but I’ve been prudent and ‘only’ came home with 3 skeins of yarn, matching buttons and two books. The books are by Annette Danielsen:

Wintertage (left) is a thinnish booklet in German, containing several easy-to-make recipes as well as 7 sweater patterns. And Fynsk Forår (right) is in Danish and contains patterns for many beautiful pullovers and cardigans, as well as fabulous photographs of Danish landscapes, buildings and art.

The designs all look very wearable and have interesting design details, like this horizontal cable along the top of vertical ones on the back of a cardigan.

And last but not least, I found a pattern, yarn and the cutest buttons for a jacket for our grandson.

More about that when I get to it.

Perhaps I should create a map with all the yarn shops I’ve blogged about – that might be useful. Until I find out how and can find the time for that, Lilla Ull Huset and all of the other ones I’ve visited can be found by clicking on ‘shopping’ in the list of tags in the right-hand column on your computer screen (below the ‘Search’ window) or via this link. The only ‘problem’ is that you’ll also need to scroll past a quilt shop, book shop and farmers’ market here and there.

Hope to see you again next week! (I’ll try to behave and keep things shorter then.) xxx

Lightness

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Hello!

In need of a little more lightness in my life, I’m abandoning all other knitting projects for the time being and starting a Featherweight Cardigan. I’ll come back to the nearly-or-half-finished warm and woolly things when the weather gets cooler in September.

I could have ordered the yarn online, but it’s always so hard to judge the colours on a computer screen. Besides, visiting a real brick-and-mortar (or in this case wood-and-glass) yarn shop is much more fun. Pink was what I wanted, but which pink?

Seeing them IRL I knew it straightaway – the palest shade top right.

I try not to buy yarn on a whim anymore, planning carefully what I want to make, what yarn will be most suitable, and how much I’ll need. But in spite of my best intentions, this naughty skein of sock yarn hopped into my shopping bag.

So irresistibly cheerful! I’m thinking of a pair of socks a little (or a lot) more intricate than my usual simple ones. Cables, perhaps, or a twisted stitch pattern, or… I don’t know. Suggestions welcome!

On the way back I stopped off at the village with the onion-shaped church steeple (I wrote about the legend behind it here.)

It’s always nice to take a stroll along the lanes. There are so many lovely spots…

… and beautiful houses.

In the past, the village was surrounded by essen – fertile, raised arable fields with a domed shape resulting from spreading many layers of manure and grass sods on them throughout the centuries. Housing estates have been built upon the essen, but in a place where a school was demolished there is now a small cornfield again.

This small, flower-filled cornfield won’t feed the world, but it does feed many birds, bees and butterflies.

Because by this time I couldn’t stop yawning, I did something I rarely do and treated myself to a cup of cappuccino before going home.

Ahhh, that did me a power of good – not just the cappuccino, but the entire little outing. Thank you for coming along. I really appreciate your company!

Textile Cycle Tours 2

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Hello, and welcome to the second day at the Weerribben Textile Festival!

Looking through the many, many photographs I’ve taken, making a selection was again a struggle. There were so many beautiful and interesting things to see. In the end, I’ve chosen to focus on the items that have made the most surprising use of materials.

Before we head off, here’s a picture to give you an idea of the landscape we’re cycling through.

We’re on the edges of the Weerribben National Park. It’s my ordinary, everyday landscape of farmland surrounded by hedgerows and small plots of woodland.

The first location we’re visiting is a gallery housed here:

Inside are multiple items by Atelier Vuurwater, a collaboration between a ceramist and a textile artist. You’ve already seen the bowls they call barstjes (cracks) at the top – cracked black raku-fired ceramic with a blue felt lining. And here are two of their urns in the same unusual combination of materials.

There are also several works solely by the textile-artist-half of this duo, Miriam Verbeek. These use only one material (felt), but in a very interesting way. They resemble old black-and-white photographs, but because of the way the felt has been manipulated they give the impression of fading, just like memories fade.

One of the nice things about cycling from location to location is that it prevents what is sometimes called ‘museum fatigue’. At our next stop, there’s this intriguing combination of acorn caps, organza, lycra, glue, wood, cardboard in a work called ‘Golden Days’ by Godelieve Spee.

It is accompanied by a poetic text about autumn and the changing of the seasons.

The next exhibit, by Janny Mensen (no website), uses different materials and techniques again: photographs transferred onto wood overlaid with embroidery. Studying it closely it looks to me like a naked female form in some sort of yoga pose, but I may be wrong. I like how the embroidery stitches resemble pine needles.

Well, time for some lunch. There are no cafés or restaurants along this part of the route, and all benches are already taken by other festival cyclists. So it’s sandwiches on the grass around the next location, I’m afraid. The locations vary from community buildings to private homes, campsites and churches. This is the church at Paasloo.

In one of the pews, there is a row of small cushions by Attje Oosterhuis:

They were made using scraps of antique silk and wool fabrics, lace, linen yarns, card and (curiouser and curiouser) bird’s nests and a bird skeleton (click on images below to enlarge):

The text embroidered in red says: ‘Let us pray for the animals… for the chickens… that they get more space and no flu… for the birds… that they take a detour… for the people… that they chase less growth…’

The next work, by Ilja Walraven, was actually on the route of the first day, but I felt it had to be included here because of the very unusual use of materials and objects: Chairs…

… with wine glasses and beakers filled with bits of sheep’s wool on the seats, arranged according to hue, from dark to light.

Is it art? It looks like it and it was made by a professional artist, so yes, I suppose so. Is it textile art? Hmmmm… And what does it MEAN? Does it matter what box it fits into? Does it matter what it means?

I also wonder why haven’t I seen a single stitch of knitting during these two days. Coincidence? Doesn’t it belong in the category textiles? Doesn’t it lend itself to art? And why do I feel drawn to making useful stuff instead of art?

Some of the things at the Weerribben Textile Festival have raised question marks. Some have made me smile or feel inspired. Others have evoked feelings of nostalgia. Some have even upset me, and I think that’s all good. Because isn’t that what art is all about – uplifting and challenging us?

Well, after this philosophizing let’s end on a light-hearted note, with whimsical collection by Erna Platel, using tins, maps, bits of ribbon and lace, buttons and other haberdashery:

The Weerribben Textile Festival will be held again in 2024. Check out the website for more information.

Textile Cycle Tours 1

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Hello!

Every other year a textile festival is held on our doorstep and I’d never been. High time to rectify that, so this year I gave myself two whole days to cycle the two tours plotted by the organisation. Textile art was displayed in 18 indoor and outdoor locations in and around the Weerribben nature reserve.

Here is my impression of the first day, the route through the peat bog part of the area. From the literally hundreds of pictures I’ve taken, I’ve chosen exhibits that have a strong link with these watery surroundings, although they are by artists from all over the country.

Take these ferns by Rineke van Zeeburg – don’t they look as if they grow here naturally?

Monique Aubertijn made shapes from hessian using crochet and embroidery. Displayed in this location, the ones below look like fish traps from a fantasy film scene.

The same artist who made the big fern leaves from rough hessian, also makes exquisite art quilts. To the left ‘Poisonous Frog’ and to the right ‘Dragonfly’.

She told me that she dyes all fabrics herself. The longer I looked, the more I saw. Dragonflies inside the dragonflies, and machine embroidery that gives the impression of veins on the dragonfly wings and of water droplets around them.

These quilts look very much at home here, where many different kinds of dragonflies flit among the water lilies.

Along the water and opposite a campsite, there’s a strange pillar in shades of rust and blue.

The sign next to it says ‘Roadside Book’. Margriet van Vliet (no website) has created a fascinating object from many of those face masks carelessly dropped along the roadsides in recent years.

To get from A to B I’ve decide to deviate from the official route and follow the ‘100-bridges-cycle-track’ (as I’m secretly calling it) instead. There are not exactly 100 bridges to cross, but there are many.

Halfway along it is a perfect lunch spot. In the reed bed right behind the bench: the song of a reed warbler. In the distance: cuckoo, cuckoo.

To reach the next location, we need to wait for a bridge in the village of Kalenberg. € 2,20 per boat, the sign along the canal says. No debit cards here. The bridge keeper collects the fee in a wooden shoe…

… attached to a fishing rod.

At the next location, two works by the same artist, Helma van Kleinwee, evoked opposite emotions in me. The first one made me laugh out loud.

The second one is so subtle, that I hope you can see it on your screen. It’s a semi-transparent piece of fabric showing two human figures, moving in the wind between two pollarded willows. For me, it is a poignant image of our fragility. It made me think of the song ‘Dust in the Wind’ by Kansas. (The funny thing is that Dutch uses the same word for both dust and fabric: stof.)

Finally, here is a sketch of a tjasker by Monique ter Beeke (no website). Only, instead of charcoal she has chosen machine embroidery as her medium. The edges are sandwiched between layers of irregularly shaped glass. (Click on images to enlarge.)

It’s the same tjasker we’re passing along our route. (A tjasker is a small wooden windmill. In the past it was used for draining the land to make peat extraction easier. Now it is sometimes used for pumping water into the land to prevent it from drying out.)

Usually, I go on outings like these together with a friend. This time I went on my own. On the one hand, that gave me complete freedom, on the other I missed the company and talking about the artworks.

Sharing this day here is a way for me to process everything. I hope it’s also been fun and interesting for you reading this. I’m planning to write about day 2 next time and hope you’ll join me again then.