It’s becoming a bit of a tradition for me to make horse heddles at the beginning of the year, as a palate cleanser of sorts after the elaborate styles I make for Christmas. This year it wasn’t obvious to me what color to paint them in though, but I knew I wanted to try smoke marbling! In this technique you cover the surface of the wood with oil paint, and then you hold it over a piece of burning birch bark. The soot from the bark rises in the warm air and gets trapped on the oil, which hardens as it oxidizes. I then added another layer of oil to lock the pigment in place, just in case, to make sure it won’t rub off on any yarn that’s threaded into the heddle.

This is an old traditional painting technique, used to make wooden surfaces look like the much more expensive marble. Wether it looks exactly like the real deal is in the eye of the beholder I guess, but like with many folk art painting techniques, it doesn’t really matter.

Smoke marbling rends very haphazard patterns and that can be a bit nerve wrecking for a …”control oriented“… person like me. The thing I find the most frustrating is that one can never repeat a pattern! But that’s also the beauty of the process I guess. A Small amount of control can be exerted by the amount of bark burned and which angle you hold the heddle above it, but mostly the patterns are just created by the way the smoke twirls.

**But won’t the soot rub off?**

In theory, no, the soot should be trapped and encapsulated in the oil of the paint. But I felt like it would be a good idea to field test that before I release the heddles into the world, so I wove a white band on one of them. I chose the one with the most soot on it (No. 15) and to my delight the band came out all clean and white! As a perk I got another band to add to my collection.

I usually don’t add any details to the backside of my heddles, mostly because it would take double the amount of time to decorate them if I did. However, smoke marbling is done in a flash so these heddles have black swoops on the backside too! All heddles are marked with my makers mark, a combined KN.

Heddles no. 1-3 in this set are made with clean cut slits, which technically means that I have painted the heddle prior to cutting the slits. This allows the bright birch wood to show in the slits, cutting up the surface of the marbled pattern and creating a visual counter balance to the muted blue gray tones of the paint.

This set consists of 41 heddles that will be released on Thursday 13 February, 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!