an indoor echo of yesterday's sunset: our rya rug!

My outdoor blips didn't work out today, as none of the images even showed up on the card! Fortunately, plan B was lying around ready to hand.

Ingrid and I had designed this rug fairly early in our marriage. It took her about five years to complete it. Not five solid years in a row, of course, but doing what she could while at various retreats and conferences, on vacations, during visits to family and so forth. (One of the things that turned out nicely is that, since we had documented all those dates and venues with a marking pen on the back, we can now turn it over from time to time and consider it as some sort of "Pre-Blipofography" journal....)

Rya means rough, and the surface of the rug is given its rough texture by twisting scissors from side to side as the "hooked rug" loops are cut in two during the final stage of making the rug. This cuts the loops into uneven strands, making it look more interesting. Perhaps the idea was to emulate the roughness of animal fur. At any rate, the rugs actually did come into being as a substitute for the wolf and bear skins that had been previously used as sleeping blankets, but which tended to deteriorate quickly in the salt laden air around the fjords.

One of the neat traditions that developed about rya rugs had prospective brides and grooms each making their own half of a future common covering. Each one would develop a separate design and neither would see the other's work until it came time to sew the two halves together. Talk about symbolism! ~ but I'll bet the rugs were beautiful....

We were told by a Swedish expert, too, that frequently a central half rectangle would be incorporated into one side of the weaving, and that its dimensions would have been shared beforehand. Those halves would then become a single rectangular figure at the central of the completed whole when they were sewn together. We liked that, and did keep the idea of a central organizing figure, but we wanted to come up with a variation of our own. A circle might have worked, but a circle is only a plane figure organized around a single central point. An elipse, on the other hand, is organized around two such points. We liked that idea a lot more!

We hope you'll enjoy it all, too.