One of the things I enjoy the most with my job is that I can create whatever I want, and this spring I have been indulging in making some really fancy floral heddles! They are painted with oil paints and a gold paint I found in a frame makers store, originally intended to be used for repairs and touch-ups on picture frames. The material is dry birch as usual!

Flower pistil thoughts

When I started working on this set I was looking for a quicker way of depicting flower pistils peeking out between the petals than I had previously done (Like this one) and I thought that if I could do a series of triangular cuts, one after another, that would create a kind of rim that would hold gold paint in place and add a layer of dimension between the petals in front and the ones in the back. It worked out quite well! My first attempt yielded the negative form you see in the picture above, and then I did another round of thinking and found out that I preferred a positive pistill shape as seen below. In the end the difference is barely visible… but the positive shape was also easier to carve!

When making flower heddles I really delight in painting the slits in one color and then stroking out paint in another color on the surface. This puts an emphasis on the three dimensional aspect of the shape, and is also in style with some flower petals that are lighter towards the center of the flower… Or as in the image above, the slits are sometimes painted in a stronger shade. I just couldn’t decide on what version i liked best so I made some of both.

While the fronts of these heddles are elaborate, the backsides are not. A simple name glyph comprised of my initials (KN) can be found here, and… Not much else!
It would be cool to make the heddles double sided but it would take twice the time to do so, which would in turn double the price (bad for you) and be boring (bad for me).

A closer look on the big one

The largest heddle of the set measures xxx and due to it’s elongated shape it was hard to get a good picture that showed all the details, so here are some closeups! This heddle pursues a theme that’s growing in the back of my mind: Something about fairytale forests and a song about golden fruit that my mom used to sing is tickling there, and a sense of wonder wants to break free. Avid followers will recognize the pattern at the base from heddles I made last summer, the “asa no ha“ (hemp leaf) pattern from the Japanese sashiko tradition lends itself to a foundation reminiscent of an iron garden gate or a stone wall.

I’ve also made a bunch of square unpainted heddles with space for 19 threads. I wanted to make them as simple and quickly as possible, and this was in equal parts to be able to offer heddles for sale that are as affordable as I can make them and also I was a bit frustrated with how long the flower heddles took to finish: They look lovely and the work is highly rewarding but sometimes one just wants to finish a piece, and then it was kind of nice to just churn out a square one before getting back to cutting fine details and painting ombré petals.

Size and scale are fickle things. All heddles in the gallery below have their measurements stated but in case numbers seem a little abstract, here’s my hand with a bunch of heddles from the set, from the smallest to the largest.

Some slight smudges

You know when you’re doing something while thinking “I shouldn’t be doing this“? Well, that’s what happened when i was moving the heddles around while they were drying and afterwards I saw that a little of the blue had been smudged on heddles no. 12 (left) and 18 (right). They really are very slight smudges and I don’t think they disturb the overall effect, but I’m going to knock down their prices a bit to compensate for it.

This set consists of 19 heddles that will be released on May 31, 21.00 Swedish time. The heddles will be for sale in the webshop, not here on the blog. This is a preview for you guys, so you can have a look at the heddles before they hit the web shop. Click or tap the images to enhance them and see the heddle measurements! If you are buying heddles from me for the first time you might want to read this blog post in preparation.

Ps. When browsing this blog post on a mobile device the text with the measurement + price info does not appear automatically when you tap a picture to enhance it. After enhancing the picture, look at the bottom right hand corner of the screen where there is a small white dot. Tap that and the info will appear!