Autumn and winter plans, 2013
In connection with Kerteminde Handcrafts Assn., an embroidery school has been organised at the museum. The first course will be held the first week of October, with a 3 hour class each day for 6 days. Another course, called “The Ladby Tapestry Stitched in Time” will be held at Mødestedet (“The Meeting Place”) in Kerteminde on November 4-9.
Summer 2013
It has become a tradition for the guided tours at the museum to end up at the tapestry workshop, where the visitors can see and hear about it.
When there are many guests, it works well to have one of us embroiderers welcome them and tell about the tapestry, after which there’s time for chatting, inspecting, touching and asking questions.
Our experience is that many guests come back several times to follow the progress of the long tapestry. It looks like many visitors, especially women, come on Wednesdays to see the tapestry and chat with us.
Guests now have the added enjoyment of taking home a brochure with an explanation of the 7 parts of the tapestry and a small print of the goddess Urdr from the tapestry. Several people have expressed their pleasure over this momento.
The browsing book with embroidery samples from the tapestry was displayed at the Cherry Festival in July: Lene from the museum was its ambassador and people showed a lot of interest in it.
We now have, in all, 61 different colours of plant-dyed wool yarn, including 7 Bayeux colours. Anette is still dyeing.
Gudrun and Inge were on the Faroe Islands to hang the original drawings of the tapestry at Færoya Fornminnissavn, the historical museum in Thorshavn.
The middle drawings are complete, have been hung, fallen down and hung up again, this time a bit better.
Each part of the tapestry now has a title, some of them new. Here are the seven titles:
The Pathways of Fate, The Landscape of Sorrow, Grave Goods, In the Pitch Dark, The March of Time and New Times.
We have begun sewing embroidery samples from the last two parts.
We celebrated the arrival of summer, congratulating each other on the good work we’d done during the previous season and expressing satisfaction that our cooperation agreement with the museum about the first tapestry is almost complete.
Lately there has been a certain royal glow about our work, with many more visitors than usual, because of the queen’s visit. The image of the goddess Urd from the tapestry was printed as a souvenir in honour of this occasion.
The queen came, saw, touched and listened, she was interested though a bit tired (it was one of those whirlwind days where she made short visits all over town). We gave her a gift, an embroidered goddess Urd, along with the original drawing.
We were on TV2-Funen on March 5, 2013
(under photo) We stitch away on the “assembly line”.
Hear and see the exciting story about the Ladby Tapestry.
You can see the film clip here:
http://www.tv2fyn/arkiv/2013/3/5?video_id=60180&autoplay=1
A visit from TV2-Funen and host Preben Dahl
(under photo) We’re all on stage to make a good TV impression.
Thursday February 26 was a long work day for the Ladby Tapestry labourers. TV2-Funen with Preben Dahl in the forefront was at the museum for most of the day to produce a program about the exciting embroidery project, the Ladby Tapestry. Filming went on from 9 AM to 4 PM. Preben Dahl spoke with the originator of the project, Inge Svensmark, artist Gudrun Heltoft, several of the volunteer embroiderers from the Ladby Tapestry Guild and Lene Feveile from the Viking Museum at Ladby. From all of this, a 10-minute segment will be shown on TV2-Funen, Tuesday March 5 at about 7:30 PM.
