Sticking Nettles - Brennesle

Experimenting with sticking nettle is a chapter by itself. We read somewhere that it contains fibers. We read in another place that its fibers were exclusive to royalties, some other places that it was used in the uniform of german soldiers at a certain time in history...

No matter what, litterature about nettles is almost not possible to find, neither on the net or in the libraries around Norway. If it exists, then god knows how much we tried and researched to get it without any considerable success.

In this case, one thing is left to be done. It is to try to find about the sticking nettles ourselves and maybe write about it, here on "Sokk og Rokk".

Hamararbeiderblad - HA

Rock as music ... and Rokk (in Norwegian) as a spinning wheel ........ "Sokk og Rokk" breaks all the borders and adds more originality to the "Under Brua" rock festival!

Today, Hanne Maren Torpen Hokstad wrote a nice reportage about us in HA - Hamararbeiderblad.

"Under Brua" Festival - "Sokk og Rokk" was there!

This year, we were invited as "festival artists" to the "Under Brua" rock festival in Hamar. We took, each his own "rokk" spinning wheel: Gilbert and George and we headed there, right next to the Viking Ship arena. We have been spinning for around 7 hours yesterday and god knows how long we will spin tonight... Nice atmosphere, lovely contact with people, and for sure a clear message to get people back to use their hands :)

Flax - Lin

During our short vacation in July, we got the opportunity of having a private flax treatment demonstration. Flax has always been fascinating as a plant, a flower and as fiber as well. It is something that you read about, you see as ready made products in some shops, but you never get to see it processed, anyway not in your daily life.

The whole process was just amazing. From breaking the dried crop to beating it, to separating the fibers from the wood, and then to clear the fibers completely, all the procedure seemed to us as interesting as dealing with wool. At the end of the day, fiber is a lovely material no matter what.

Needless to say that we bought the breaking tool ("brake" in norwegian, I dont know the name in english) and the separating tool ("hekle" in norwegian).





Now we are ready to start our flax - Linen journey. God knows where it can lead us !

Let's go Natural !

Here we go! This is a serie of natural colour handspun yarns. The first is Norwegian autumn wool "Norsk høstull" and the three others are 3 different shades of grey coming from Norwegian Pelsull. All the 4 yarns are made of 2 threads combined with a very thin golden thread that gives a little descreet shine.

It would be interesting to complete the serie with 2 different shades of brown !? maybe from a Norwegian Spælsau !? hmmm, that was a brilliant idea !

Shopping Time !

No comments :)

Textile Exhibition in Natthagen Galleri

Tomorrow, Saturday the 7th. of August 2010, Natthagen Galleri ( the gallery that we ourselves run) will open a textile exhibition with the artist Karin Stang. Around 35 woven and embroidered artworks will be exhibited until the 29th. of August.

All we can say is that the work of Karin Stang is as colourful as ever, full of life, deeply elegant and has a strong expression.

Harald Romstad, the chairman of Løten by replacement, will be inaugurating the exhibition.

All are welcome !

English Confect - Engelsk Konfekt

We spent the whole day reworking some of our yarns. For a certain reason, some of them went with too little "twinning" while combining the 2 threads together. Among these yarns, here is our "English Confect" yarn. That is how it looked (up) and that is how it looks now (down). It is such an encouraging result that makes us very happy :)

Furry Vacation !

All in all, we came back from vacation with around 20 kilos of wool and a big bag fulln of flax (linen), thanks to Eirik , Jon F. among others.

Most of the wool comes from "Old Norwegian Spælsau" in different colours: white, brown, black and all the tones in between. Lovely !