A Viking Surprise in Sweden

I was in northern Europe for two weeks in the first part of July. I spent a week in Duisburg, Germany, giving a workshop on my method of doing content analysis with a Microsoft Access database. I did not expect there would be a weaving store in Duisburg, but my hostess and her student found a nice knitting yarn store for me, appropriately named Wolle (wool). I picked up some nice bamboo yarn on sale in several primary colors, some novelty yarns, a ball of Opal sock yarn, and some soy and maize based yarns. They had some Italian kid mohair in a light pea green that I thought was not quite right for my growing lime green stash, but I bought two balls of it just in case.

The following week I went to Gothenburg, Sweden, to attend the International Sociological Association Congress and give a paper. I was excited about the possibility of finding a real weaving store in  the second largest city in Sweden.

The male hotel concierge couldn’t find anything in Google, and wasn’t even sure what word to use, but one of the women told me how to get to a yarn shop just a few tram stops away, on a side street and down in a basement. I asked if it was a weaving or a knitting shop and she said it had everything. I had a couple of free hours before my presentation, and couldn’t resist setting off for the yarn shop. I found the side street and a couple of blocks down, found the yarn shop.

It was mostly knitting yarn. They had nice color-matched skeins of hand-dyed wool in two weights and matching loop mohair, but it was from Latin America so it was not a particular bargain to buy in Europe. One display table had some interesting cones of multi-colored flat novelty yarn in three or four colorways, but there was no price or label. They showed it knitted up in combination with another yarn and it was quite attractive. When I asked, they said it was Noro mulberry paper yarn. I had never seen this particular yarn before anywhere, although they said it had been available for quite some time. At any rate, I was not about to buy Japanese Noro yarn in Sweden, so I filed that away to look for on my next trip to Japan in October.

Then I found the sale baskets. There wasn’t much, but I found a couple of skeins of loop mohair, and a nice skein of Colinette mohair in peach shades. So I bought those and called it a day.

The next morning I asked again at the concierge desk, saying that I thought there must be a weaving store, not just the knitting yarn store. They still couldn’t find one, but this time they sent me a five minute walk away to a different knitting yarn store called Daisy Design. The owner told me there used to be a weaving yarn store in Gothenburg, but it had moved to northern Sweden.

This yarn store had a display of gorgeous circular knitting needle sets made of multicolored wood. I believe they dye strips of the wood in different colors, and then cut and turn the wood so the colors come out in variegated patches. I actually have a set of salt and pepper shakers at the lake made out of the same kind of wood. At any rate, I couldn’t resist. So I bought myself a beautiful set of circular needles with different cable lengths, and threw in a few extra needles and cables, since I usually knit socks and other things in the round with two circular needles of the same size. I was dealing in Euros, and it was easy to forget that they were actually considerably more than dollars.  And the shop was happy to take my credit card.

This shop also had some heavy linen yarn on sale, so I bought several balls in cranberry, tan, black, and grey. There was a small display of Debby Bliss Pure Silk yarn, which I have been using for the past year. It was not on sale, but the shop owner said this yarn is being discontinued and won’t be available at all anymore. She was about to put it on sale, so she offered it to me at the sale price. I bought a few skeins of a light grey that I have been using in combination with other hand-painted silks. I had bought enough in this store that the owner filled out a tax free form for me, sealed up the bag, and explained what I needed to do to get the tax back at the airport. I left reasonably happy with my yarn shopping, but disappointed that I had not found a real weaving store in Sweden.

That afternoon, my last day in Sweden, I had signed up for a tour of a Viking village as part of the Congress activities. It was a nice half-hour  bus ride with a knowledgeable guide to the Viking village, which is being reconstructed on the site where they found a viking ship in the 1930s. The main building looks like an inverted boat, with a long curved roof. We stepped inside the building and there it was– a real, warp-weighted loom!

Warp-weighted loom at Viking village in Sweden

I had read about warp-weighted looms in Elizabeth  Barber’s books, but of course I had never seen a real one. Barber has written about how archaeologists had found lots of sites with simple  upright wooden structures and a pile of clay or stone objects on the floor, but for a long time they did not comprehend that these were the remains of weaving looms. Now they know that the pile of weights is the tell-tale sign of a warp-weighted loom. The loom I saw  had doughnut-shaped clay loom weights. I bought a replica of one in the gift shop that looks just like the black one in the lower left of the picture below. I guess I’ll use it as a paper weight.

Warp weights tied to warp threads. My souvenir looks just like the black one at lower left.

In Inge Dam’s workshop in Honolulu she had showed us how they sometimes made a narrow woven band to hold the warp threads for a warp-weighted loom. They would measure out the warp threads at double the desired length, and weave them as weft into the band, so that the warps were all trailing out of one side of the band. Then they could tie the woven band horizontally across the top of the vertical warp-weighted loom, and attach the weights to the ends of the warp threads. The one I saw did not seem to have such a band across the top.

There were a number of young people sitting around in costume, but they said the one person who know how to weave on the loom was not there that day. The loom had places to hold the shed bar, and there was a beater stick in the shed that apparently was used to beat the weft in. The loom weights really did hold the warp threads down quite firmly, but it still seems crazy to me that you would have to beat upward to put each weft thread in place. The small amount that had been woven was put in quite loosely, and I don’t think the woolen yarn would have filled in the spaces even if it were wet-finished. The homespun garments the young workers were wearing had certainly not been made on this loom.

This type of warp-weighted loom was in use in northern Europe around 1000 C.E., at a time when the Chinese and Japanese were weaving beautifully patterned silk brocades on horizontal looms–both simple floor looms and drawlooms with multiple harnesses. You can weave on a warp-weighted loom, but nobody today would want to when there are better alternatives available.

So even though I didn’t find a weaving store, I left Sweden delighted that I had seen a real warp-weighted loom. I was even happier when I turned in my tax-free form at the airport and received $27 back on my yarn store purchase.

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