My journey into heddle-weaving: The beginning, October 2024
I obsess. Lately, it’s been weaving bands with a heddle. Kerstin Neumüller taught me, in her beautiful book “Simple weave”. What I’ve learned: I like linen yarn best. Wool is too rough, it sticks, its feel in the hand is not as satisfying. I like how the linen glides.
Next challenge: Coming up with creative ways to use the bands!
My journey into heddle-weaving: The middle, June 2025
It has been an obsession of mine. I think, for ten month, until mid-May. I did not knit. I did not read books, or try new recipes. I have woven ribbons with a heddle. Meters and meters of them, more than anyone would find reasonable from a person who does it as a hobby. Spent hours and hours, nights, weekends. And initially, I did not even have anything obvious to use the ribbons for.
Now, I have come up with some uses – but first, I just felt this strong urge to weave. The combination: Monotony, but adventures in color. Keeping track of the warp, how tactile it is. I prefer linen yarns. Activating the senses, but thoughts: Paused.
I do have a capacity to dive deep into things. But also, this time: I was stuck at home a lot during the past year.
First, in the autumn, I had some weird kind of almost-burnout that made me sleep much more than normal.
And then, in January, an issue I’ve been having for multiple years now, a myoma (a non-cancerous tumor in the uterus) that has been making me have excessive menstrual bleeds and that I’ve been treating with medication, got much worse. I bled non-stop for a month-and-a-half. The bleeds got increasingly heavier. It was hard for me to leave home, because I would bleed through everything. In mid-February, I started going back and forth to the hospital for blood transfusions. One day, the worst, I bled two liters of blood – part of it while sitting on the toilet in my hospital room, leaking like a broken hose, hooked up to a bag of blood, getting a transfusion. Blood just flowing through me. This is how dark my humor is: In that moment, I found the situation hilarious – but none of the worried nurses laughed when I explained to them how this would make a great comedy sketch.
In early March, I had surgery, removing the lime-sized myoma and after that, spring was a slow journey of my body recovering. I think, with all the physical and mental exhaustion, being stuck at home: The monotony of weaving, the creativity within a very narrow space of expression, made for such a grounding activity. In combination with comfort TV. I could combine colors, come up with variations to the simple patterns, but there was no math, no sketching, no unraveling, no need to actually think. It was what I needed, in recovery.
Now, end of June, I feel mostly OK. And I have started to knit again. Reading books. Writing. Capable of doing more than obsess over colors and two row ribbon patterns.
My journey into heddle-weaving: A kind of ending, maybe, January 2026.
I, in my body, have had a tumultuous year 2025. The exhaustion, the bleeding, surgery, medications that have all kinds of adventurous side effects, recovery that meant I needed to let my body rest, mentally and physically.
Then, developing plantar fasciitis (inflammation in my heel) because, all the other pain and side-effects from blood loss made me not properly notice that my foot was starting to ache from the long hours of standing barefoot while obsessively weaving during sick leave. So, during the second half of the year, I had to avoid walking. Recovery is such a long, slow process.
I have cancelled so many plans with people. Not because I did not want to see them, but because the idea of having to keep up a conversation felt overwhelming. The thought of physically transporting myself places, like I was drained of energy before I had even started the journey.
I have gained weight. So much weight. And also, I guess, aged. I don’t recognize myself when I look in the mirror. It is new in my life, having to start thinking more carefully about what I eat, thinking about my body as something to be dealt with, balancing side-effects of medications I still have to take. I have felt betrayed – not for the weight as such, but for the whole thing. I want to eat stupid stuff, to punish my body and to feel better. Some days, I let myself.
But that is not how it works. I know that. I need to look for other comforts. And also: Be okay with my body as it is now. It has been through so much. We are not in opposition.
This is how I want to enter into the new year: With a body that slowly is starting to feel more like me again.
Katja Malmborg 