Heddle release: April 21, 2022 + Raffle!
While the heddles of the blue town were away on their exhibition in January I started to carve domed heddle houses. I was listening to the audiobook “The golem and the jinni“ by Helene Wecker, in which a jinni builds an illusory castle in the desert among other things. I started to long for brighter days, and felt like the blue houses and the winter months needed to make space for spring and light.
And then Russia attacked Ukraine, and I saw a picture of the Khyiv-Pechersk Lavra, an eastern orthodox christian monastery in Khyiv and it became pretty clear to me where my carving was taking me.
Khyiv-Pechersk Lavra, photo from Wikimedia.
As you might imagine I want to do something to help the Ukrainian people in need. And then I started thinking about how the plight of the Ukrainian people was kind of getting more attention than the plight of other groups of people suffering horribly all over the world… And that thought left a really foul taste in my mouth. Now, Im not a very politically oriented person, but this time I felt I needed to re-arrange my plans a bit. Originally I wanted to raffle one of the heddles off, and that a ticket would be 100 Sek donated to UNHCR and directed to Ukraine. But after thinking for a while, this is what I have decided to do: If you donate to UNHCR, Médecins sans frontières or the Red cross , make a mention of “heddle“ somewhere in the donation message, take a print screen of it and send it to me(I will be accepting Emails about this to heddlenews@gmail.com only) then I’ll sign you up for the raffle! This way you are free to choose if you want to donate to Ukraine or any other people suffering in the world.
Donate money, win this heddle!
Donate 100 SEK or your currency’s equivalent to one of the organisations mentioned above
Mention heddle somewhere so it’s clear that you’re not entering an old donation to the raffle
Send a screenshot of the donation confirmation to heddlenews@gmail.com. Any confirmations sent on instagram or to my other Email address will not be considered valid as raffle tickets.
The raffle closes on April 19, and the winner will be announced on April 20.
I will pay for the shipping fees, no matter where in the world you are (Shipments to Russia and Ukraine would have to wait for a while though)
I will use a random number generator to choose the winner
If you want to donate several times in order to enter several lottery tickets, that’s fine with me!
Only one heddle (the one shown here) will be offered in the raffle, and only one winner will be announced. Please mention your Instagram name in the Email if you would like to be mentioned on Insta.
I will also be offering up nine gold-roofed heddles for sale!
As usual these are made out of birch wood, and the grey paint I used is linseed oil with pigment mixed in but when I tried mixing the gold pigment into oil the results weren’t exactly what I had hoped for. Enter on stage: my clever mother Karin who suggested I use shellac instead and woah! The coverage was so good, I really felt like I was gilding the roofs with my paintbrush.
You see, the linseed oil paint needs to be added in very thin layers in order to dry properly but the shellac could instead be added quite thickly which was a nice change. I did however give the roofs a layer of yellow paint before adding the gold-colored shellac mixture, to create a good base. In hindsight that might have been unnessecary.
This set consists of 9 heddles that will be released on April 21, 21.00 Swedish time. The heddles will be for sale in the webshop, not here on the blog. If it is your first time buying a heddle from me you might want to read this blog post to know what to expect! Here 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!
