Teacher and mentor Ulla Parkdal with the author.
By Christine Novotny
In the spring of 2022, I visited Scandinavia to meet and work with master artisans and explore handweaving in these cultures. One stop was the Stockholm archipelago, where I had a studio visit with the incredible Ulla Parkdal. Ulla is an 82 year-old weaver with an extensive career in designing and weaving rölakan rugs. We spent the afternoon together, and I was enlivened by Ulla’s spirit and her vast knowledge of both technical and industrial skills for creating these beautiful traditional rugs.
After I met Ulla, I knew I wanted to come back and work with her. She talked of hard work and grit, protecting and preserving your body as a career weaver, and had an incredible amount of beautiful hand-drawn designs and woven work. I wrote and received a grant from the American Scandinavian Foundation to design, weave and finish a rug with Ulla at her home studio in the Stockholm archipelago. This June, I traveled to Sweden to make that a reality.
Rölakan is a well-practiced Scandinavian weaving technique for creating tapestry and hard-wearing carpets. The pattern is laid in completely by hand (not with a shuttle), and the weft covers the warp. It is woven in plain weave. What began as decorative wall and chair coverings with thin wool yarn and folk tapestry imagery developed into thicker carpets with a more geometric style. The style of rug that Ulla weaves is woven with linen warp and a wool rug yarn (mattgarn) that is typically held together in bundles of five strands of varying colors. This combination of colors creates nuance and visual texture in these rugs.
There are many cultures that weave tapestry in this way, with the difference being the actual way the patterns are held together – whether the wefts lock around each other, or create slits and move at regular intervals to bind sections together. In rölakan, the weft bundles all move in the same direction, and color changes in the pattern are wrapped around the same warp end, rather than creating a slit. Like many folk traditions, the way it is practiced in Sweden and Norway varies by geographic region, with a lot of influence coming from kilims from oriental traders.
I arrived in Stockholm just before Midsommar, and Ulla and I settled into learning about one another and bestowing craft knowledge. Her home is peppered with Swedish craft ephemera and a stunning collection of her own handwoven rugs and wall textiles. Jetlagged, I quickly designed multiple rugs on the first day, and Ulla helped me fill out one design and we set to work from there.
The days were filled with many fika breaks (a mid-morning and mid-afternoon break that typically involves coffee and cookies), and we’d move around the garden to follow the shade in the six different tables she’d placed. I appreciated her aptitude for taking breaks and noticing the world around her, while also working diligently and smartly in the studio, accepting the importance of focus, and meeting deadlines.
I remember when I first met Ulla, the other weaver I was with mentioned a “flow” state of creativity. Ulla’s face immediately changed and she vehemently exclaimed that she did not believe in “flow.” She believed in showing up at the studio every day, not waiting for inspiration but creating it through steady and constant work and diligence. It made me think of one of the rules from Sister Corita Kent’s rules for artists and teachers: “The only rule is work.” This may make Ulla sound particularly rigid, but I actually found her to be a lot looser than other Swedish weavers I’d worked with. She moved quickly through each step, wasn’t particularly fussy with tension on the loom, didn’t care about the names of weave structures. She just did what she wanted, and laughed at how young weavers were so concerned with techniques. Ulla prized experimentation and innovation, not complication.
My rug is a testament to the hard work and playfulness I experienced while in her studio. We both lovingly called the rug Little Dots, referring to the small dots of color that I wove in at random throughout the repeating diamond pattern. They were playful and dynamic, the diamonds pattern repetitive and structured. I love to play the “what if” game when I’m viewing art and design. Imagining “what if the dots weren’t there?” gives me a very different rug.
To create even more dynamism, each solid section of the rug is a woven with alternating combinations and ratios of the colors. The poppy red of the background is woven with three different combinations of colors. Each color consists of 5 strands of rug yarn – so one combo would be one red, two orange, one coral, one mauve. Another might be two red, two coral, one orange. As I wove the background, I would irregularly change out the combinations I was weaving with, to avoid regular stripes in the work. Each green/blue diamond is a different combination of greens, blues and periwinkles. This slight shift through the rug is subtle but it’s the way we really see color and pattern in the world. Nothing is just one color, nothing repeats perfectly. I have incorporated this tenet into my own design and weaving practice, trying to move past my type A tendencies as a weaver and embrace the shifts within.
My experience with Ulla really shaped the way I view the longevity of my work, and the ways that I express myself through non loom-controlled design. It’s also a beautiful thing to leave a new country with a wise and loving friend. I look forward to teaching this technique at Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum and Folk Art School in Decorah, Iowa, and North House Folk School in Grand Marais, MN. Keep your eye out for classes in the future!
Christine Novotny, October 2023
Christine Ann Novotny is a Minnesota-based handweaver, educator, and designer who runs the textile studio CAN Goods. She seeks to bring a vibrant, colorful energy to handweaving that invites people to reconsider the textiles in their life, and to evolve the practice of handweaving through contemporary handwoven goods and craft education.
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