Heddle release: March 24, 2024
I do love making heddle horses. Actually I also delight in looking back through the years of heddle horses, seeing how they change and get more defined - I guess that happens when repeating a form. I draw all me heddles free-hand with graphite on the wood before I start carving, so they are all slightly different - but, as you can see, also quite the same.
These heddles are painted with homemade milk paint in a style intended to look like marble - or to imitate marble imitation. Maybe the likeness to an exact stone marble pattern isn’t what’s most important, but rather the -feeling- it evokes. Anyway, there are a fair amount of paint layers on these horses - about 6 or so if I remember correctly. The paint is sealed off with a coat of lins seed oil, which gives more depth to the hues of the milk paint. I used many pigments to achieve the blue tones: Ultramarine and indigo for blues, a touch of nickel yellow, and some zinc and titanium white in the base. All in all, the paint isn’t suitable for eating, but I don’t suppose any of you had plans on that anyway.
While the paint on these heddles is properly sealed it will wear down with time and use, telling the story of the bands you wove together.
If you’re new to painted marble you might enjoy these examples I photographed at Julita gård in Södermanland, Sweden. Julita is a large open-air museum and well worth a visit. The tradition of painting wood or stucco so that it looks like marble dates back to the medieval era in Scandinavia, and the styles have evolved in wildly different styles in different regions depending on what kinds of paint were used and what the local painters were inspired by.
While the heddles are painted on both the front and the backside I haven’t done the last layer of marbling on the backside, which seems worth to mention. The backside is, however, marked with my little name cipher, a combined “K N”.
The backside shows one of the layers of paint that builds up the marbles pattern: A thin, sloshy coat of paint with a high indigo content is applies and then I let it kind of slide around for a while to create haphazard dark spots and highlights that I later enhance using painted lines.
The upcoming release is actually going to include some other things than heddles. I’m adding blue knifes with tiny stars, handmade knife sheaths of birch bark and my handcarved candles as well!
This set consists of 16 heddles that will be released on March 24, 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!
