Dala Floda, part 1 – Heaven is a Place on Earth

If I should end up in heaven when I die – I´m sure that I´ll recognize the place.

I never thought that I would live to see such a huge collection of beautiful Dala Floda costumes!

Anna-Karin Jobs Arnberg, who organized the weekend in Dala Floda, had borrowed some from the local village museum and some of them come from her own family. Her mother and grandmother were both embroiderers – or påsömmerskor as they say in Floda.

Anna-Karin is a very talented påsömmerska herself, and had made a beautiful jacket with embroidered flowers, that I failed to take a photo of. But this is Anna-Karin arranging all the dräktdelar (costume parts).

From the beginning everything looked the same to me, but we quickly learnt to distinguish between older and slightly newer embroidery and knitted sleeves. There is also quite a difference between costumes from Floda and the neighbour parish of Gagnef. But these two jackets are pretty typical for Floda.

The knitted sleeves were sewn onto a bodice made of green woollen material. Anna-Karin has written a very interesting essay about the knitted sleeves and gave us a talk in the evening. Then the teacher Karin Kahnlund, taught us how to knit the mittens that belong to the costume in a special twined technique.

On the inside of the sleeve you can see that the knitter bound every second stitch and on the following row made sure that they did not line up.

The patterns are smaller closer to the cuff and grow bigger as the sleeves get wider.

Sometimes the knitter would use embroidery patterns for the knitted sleeves. These rather complicated flowers are probably an example of that.

On Saturday there was the annual local market for selling and/or trading costumes. Eva Eriksson – who gave us a very interesting talk about the costumes in the nearby parish of Boda – bought this cute hat for one of her daughters.

I bought two old embroidered hats, too – even if my teenage daughter wouldn´t be caught dead in one. I just needed a little hat like this, you know...

And as soon as I have save up enough I think that I need a jacket like this, too.

To be continued...