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A good Monday to you, dear readers!

First thing’s first – I (finally) managed to get the Bat Shawl onto Ravelry and there’s a discount code for you!

I know this isn’t the most striking piece I’ve made but I do love it. I know many knitters expect shawls to be intricate and/or very MUCH but this is a very practical, calm, triangular shawl that is simply very useful. And somehow knitting endless rows of 2x1 ribbing in a fine wool yarn is quite soothing…

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• Animals (dead or alive)

• Human remains

• Weapons or parts thereof

• Narcotics and drugs

Some promises sure are easier to keep than others.

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We live on a mountain, right at the top
There's a beautiful view from the top of the mountain
Every morning I walk towards the edge and throw little things off
Like car parts, bottles, and cutlery, or whatever I find lying around

I enjoy early mornings: the quiet house with my family all safe in their sleeps, as I make coffee and knit in my favourite chair. One by one they others will wake up and the day will start, but for a while, everything is still.

The past few weeks have been a bit rough for no apparent reason. Writing about what’s hard and sore often feels like wallowing, which I have no interest in but find myself more prone to the older I get. As Werner Herzog says:

Despair must be kept private and brief.

But I’m not interested in perpetuating the idea of a friction-free life either. How dull. On Monday I was on the train station on my way to Copenhagen to spend the day with Erika Åberg (who I wrote The Island and the Forest with) when I lost my eyesight: I’ve had aura migraines for years and know them well. So I turned back home and slept for hours and had time to think about how I normally spend my days, since I had no chance to actually work. As I lay in bed reading Traversal (which will definitely last me through autumn, like a loaf of rich bread or a tall glass of stout) by Maria Popova, I wondered when I last read during the day, in bed, for as long as I felt like it. I can’t remember: like it was a bad habit I was glad to be rid of. I do still read, of course, but not like this, without tasks lined up to be managed on the other side of the cover. It’s as if I’ve been switched ON for the whole year and finally someone hit the OFF button: like when you don’t realise you hear the kitchen fan until someone turns it off and the room suddenly becomes blissfully quiet.

So, I have to get some reasonable work boundaries in. I know this, and I know you know this, and everyone that knows anything about being creative will tell you that rest, play and recovery are all most important things. Not optional. Not something to be done after the to do-list has been ticked off. (Hint: it’s never finished, it’s infinite, like Hilbert’s paradox:

Imagine a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on. Now suppose that every room is already occupied, with one guest per room. In an ordinary hotel, if all the rooms were full, no more guests could be accepted. In Hilbert’s Grand Hotel, however, this is not a problem.

Suppose a new guest arrives at the reception. It may appear that there is no space, but the manager asks the guest in Room 1 to move to Room 2, the guest in Room 2 to move to Room 3, and so on. Each guest moves to the next room. This frees up Room 1, which allows the new guest to check in, even though the hotel was already full.

While this paradox relates to understanding the concept of infinity, it sure feels as if it applies to the to do-lists in a small business, or life, too…)

Anyhow. I’m doing fine, I just need to play a little more and work a little less, which brings me to the upside of this letter: my very own yarn!

Since the last New Moon Letter, two boxes of finished yarn have arrived, in two different colours: almost black, and lightest grey. These were the colours I decided on for my trial spin, where a fair amount of wool has to be carded in order to make sure the yarn is consistent. It wouldn’t be possible to spin just 1 kg of each test in my mill, so to make sure I had the best chance of getting the fine tuning right we decided to card 20 kg of each colour and spin different test batches. Then the wool was put aside until I had made my decision on which version to go for. Now everything is spun up to the settings I chose and I finally have enough yarn to swatch, knit and play with in preparation for the big release!

I’m not quite sure how I thought it would make me feel, this knitting with a yarn that I designed: I’m a fairly optimistic person but try to level my expectations. But I truly love working with this yarn – it’s what I had hoped for, and then some. A marvellous feeling. It’s woolly and bouncy, has a wonderful scent, is soft to the touch with just a bit of tooth. So far I’ve made numerous swatches, one and a half sweaters on smaller needles and a shawl on larger needles. Knit up at a tighter gauge, it’s even and feels very durable, and keeps its shape perfectly after wet blocking. At a looser gauge, as in the shawl, the softness shines through and it has a nice amount of drape.

I set out to create a yarn that could work for a wide range of projects, that is soft but still woolly, and that has wool’s wonderful, natural properties. I’m very, very happy with how this turned out. I’ll be sharing more about the process of moving things along towards the release in my weekly Making a Monday posts for paid subscribers, and in the next New Moon Letter, I just may have the first little batch of all the colours here to show you.

As some of you have already discovered, it’s now possible to follow Sägen Yarns on Instagram. I will use this account to collect information, going-ons and other things relating to both my hand dyed Sägen yarns, as well as this batch of custom spun ones. I have been reluctant to start posting though: it’s intimidating to start formulating something that has been a dream built in small steps for a long time. It will ease up as I start writing, no doubt. Sometimes you just have to get going to see where you’re headed.

Before I sign off, I wanted to give myself a little nudge to get the Bat shawl onto Ravelry soon. It’s the one in the photo above and it was originally published in my first book Observations: Knits and Essays from the Forest. I’ve had the pattern almost ready for most of the summer, but something about all those charts scare me. Since a digital pattern doesn’t have the same space limitations as a book does, I reworked and enlarged all the charts to make the pattern clearer. I will also try to somehow add notes on how to make an “Any weight”-version, so that you can use any yarn weight. It did turn out quite well in this new yarn, didn’t it..?

One pattern from Observations that is already out on Ravelry is the Dawn top, and this my third sample has been finding its way into my days a lot lately. It’s knitted in Sägen Light Fe, in the colourways Underjord and Kvast, for a more autumnal feel than the original pastel ones in the book. Since the book is sold out in all languages and won’t be reprinted, I’ll be adding all the patterns to Ravelry one by one. You can find the Lake socks and the Mushroom raglan there now, and I’ll work my way through the Dragonfly sweater, Badger sweater, Dusk cardigan and Woodpecker vest one by one.

I was originally planning to write the end of this letter late tonight, and to add a few photos of tonight’s eclipse. But that will have to wait – heeding my own advice of not working until I hit a wall, I’ll click send now. The early morning has rolled over to afternoon: the dogs are ready for their walk and I’m ready to let go of the day so far. I hope you get to see the eclipse tonight, but please remember to not look directly at the sun if you don’t have protective gear! I’ll be using a colander with the kids – we’ll go to the lake with a clear view to the west, and it will be a wonder. And if you’re a night owl, the Perseids meteor shower peaks tonight. What a day to be in the world.

Take care.
Lotta

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This is the last week at home before we go to south-western Jutland for our vacation. I’ve longed to go there all year and had these grand id…

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It’s high summer here in the forest. My mornings walks are once again rather silent, without the intense chirping and singing and twittering that fill the air in spring and early summer. Midsummer has come and gone and these weeks feel like the top of an inhale: the expansion slowing down, everything resting for a short while before the wheel turns again towards darker, colder days.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be creative. My husband is an (academic) writer and on many of our walks with the dogs, we discuss this again and again, grinding the topic with our minds like millstones. Where does inspiration come from, how free can we be in our creative fields, what is motivation, ingenuity, originality and synchronicity?

I think, as I get older, that I fall more and more in love with the idea of being a medium rather than an innovator. I am more humble than I was, and I no longer believe neither of two conflicting ideas that fought for space in my mind when I was younger: that creative work had to be completely original to be worthwhile, while simultaneously, that nothing is new under the sun.

I think that working with a textile craft that has changed very little over a very long period of time, and which is simple enough to learn, has given me a deeper understanding of what creativity can look like. There may truly be nothing new under the sun when we think about how knitting is made up by two simple stitches; knits and purls. We can twist them and move them around, distort them and change colours, but the basis of knitting is still these two stitches. Yet there is an endless creativity in this craft.

As I write in my correspondence with Erika Åberg in our book The Island and the Forest, I never seem to find a good answer to the question “what inspires you”. I think it’s because I often get the feeling that the question is a bit skewed: that the answer should be some Thing, while inspiration more than anything is a state of mind. For me, being inspired means being in some sort of balance in myself. I’m a Scorpio so I will forever cherish the idea of the suffering artist living on cigarettes and wine, making beautiful art on long sleepless nights, but the reality is much duller than that: inspiration requires regular sleep and decent food, a manageable level of stress and just a bit of input.

When people ask what inspires me, I suppose they want me to give them that “input” thing that’s easy to understand and fun to think about. And even though I do say that nature inspires me, or art or history, the most important thing is that I need to be able to be inspired. I actually take great care not to “look for inspiration” in the outer world too much. I rarely look at what other knitwear designers are doing, I’m not actively keeping up with trends, and I’ve never made a mood board. I fear that paying too much attention to what others are doing will make it harder for me to know what I want to do. If I feel a lack of inspiration, the solution is rarely to go someplace that ought to be inspiring. Rather than moving in the outer world, I need to regain my footing in the inner landscape. That way, the outer world can move through me, and I can create from that.

So instead I try to set myself up for the chance of being inspired. And then, inspiration is everywhere. Right now I’m working on my next book idea and that has given me great opportunities to think about not only what inspires me, but how I want to put that inspiration to use. Earlier this summer, I received a work grant from Det fria ordets hus in my home town Växjö. A great honour that will allow me to develop the idea of creating a knitwear book set in three old, rural industries in my area: paper, iron and glass. It’s extremely inspiring (!) to meet with people who work with crafts in a vastly different way than I do, and bringing this together asks a lot of interesting questions:

Can I look to people and places far beyond my regular work setting, and bring their perspectives into my world? How can I elevate the work of others with my own work? What happens if I take my creative language – my knitting and writing and photographing – to a completely different place that has nothing to do with textile crafts or garments? I’m savouring this part of the process where many doors are still open and everything feels possible, and I’m also relishing this intense feeling of what I described at the start of this letter: of being a medium. These places that I go to, they do something to me, stir my thinking and feeling and ignite a reaction. New connections light up, patterns and pathways take shape in my creative mind, and it’s absolutely wonderful.

Something that is much closer in time is another big project I’ve been hinting about for a while now, and since my production order has now been finalised, I’m very happy to tell you that I’ll be launching my very own yarn later this year! I’ve been playing with this idea for a long, long time but it’s always felt too daunting, or not like the perfect time, or other things we tell ourselves when big changes loom. The truth is that the perfect time doesn’t exist, and it’s always daunting, and we must simply start anyway.

This yarn will be added to the lineup of my hand dyed Sägen Yarns. I’ll keep you in the dark about all the details for a bit longer, but if you’ve been following my work for some time it will come as no surprise that it will be a natural, untreated wool blend in a colour palette inspired by the forest, lakes and landscape around me. The wool is sourced and spun in England and I’ve chosen the fibres and construction to make a versatile yarn that I know I can return to year after year. I hope you will too!

You can already follow Sägen Yarns on Instagram (somehow making that first post is absolutely terrifying!) and I’m working on a website where all the details on both the hand dyed yarn and this custom spun yarn will be gathered in one place. The yarn launches this autumn. There’s much to do and it feels exciting and scary and absolutely wonderful all at once.

Before I leave you on this sunny new moon day, I have a heads-up for you: the next new moon will coincide with the Perseids meteor shower! A dark moon means the best chances to get a really good look at the meteors as they cross the night sky so as long as the weather cooperates and it’s not an overcast night, August 13 will bring some really amazing stargazing.

The Perseids meteor shower is an annually recurring meteor shower, and the best thing is that you don’t even need binoculars or a telescope – you can see the shooting stars with the naked eye. Head out to an area with a big sky and as little light pollution as possible, and look to the constellation Perseus (I use the free app SkyView Lite to locate things in the night sky). I’ll be wearing my Perseids sweater, inspired by this very event: always tying together knitting with the wider natural world.

With that, I hope that the new moon brings you clarity and some peace of mind. I’ll be doing my best to do less: enjoy the warm days with the kids, be outside, sew, knit, paint and do whatever my crooked little heart tells me to. A lot of work lies ahead, but for a while longer, the hours will float freely and I will go with them.

Lotta

Here’s a sweet message to you this Monday: it’s short on words but earlier today I went out to photograph the abundance of flowers growing along the old stone wall for you. Lady’s bedstraw, yarrow, all the raspberries, and a few stinging nettles to keep things interesting.

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Although this day hasn’t been about work or making in any direct sense, I know now that it is what feeds creativity and that what I did today will …

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This Monday comes to you from a very warm forest. The air is warm, the wind is warm, the water in the lake is warmer than I think I’ve ever known before: 27 C according to an older man I met yesterday when me and the kids were cooling down, or trying to.

I’ve had my annual summer sale in the yarn shop this weekend (the sale ends tonight in case the algorithms have been hiding my posts from you) and this year it’s been over the top. I’ve been packing orders non-stop and in between water breaks and trying to find the coolest spot in the old stone house that holds the shop, I’ve had plenty of time to think about how immensely grateful I am that so many have chosen to stick around this weird little business for so long. It’s been hectic and wonderful, and once the last order is packed and dropped off, I’ll be slowing down. Apart from a week on the Danish west coast, I don’t take time off work completely. It suits me quite well to work a few hours in the morning and then hang out with the kids, do day trips or just potter around at home.

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Dear reader,

I suspect that some of you have missed the New Moon Letters. Maybe you didn’t notice when they stopped coming, and some who are reading this never got them in the first place. I wrote the first New Moon Letter on the first new moon of 2020. Back then I had just quit my job to become fully self-employed, building on little more than a trust in my own capacity and creativity, and a deep-rooted sense that a more “normal” career, albeit the best kind as I was a librarian, was not what I wanted.

^{21 WITH PRISM IN THE FOREST.}

Now it’s been almost seven years. The New Moon Letters went silent after a rough patch in 2024. I was juggling a loss in the family, some health scares and the feeling of being a bit… unmoored after my first book Observations had been published the year before. Writing these long, slow letters and making room for the more vulnerable sides of myself – observing my inner landscape through the shifting outer seasons – became hard, as I became hard. I will not dwell on these matters for long but with the privilege of perspective that time gives, I think that I, in the midst of everything else, was quite terrified by how my business grew and what it meant for me as a maker and creator. Combined with the hurt, I dove into more direct, visibly “productive” work and focused my energy on becoming better at running a business that could provide me with a sustainable and long-term income. I made smart decisions that were absolutely sound and good for my business, and thus for me in many ways, but which also meant more admin work, more boring work (I don’t do boring very well), more complex issues to deal with – and less time for the kind of creative refuge and inquiry that I wanted to bring to the New Moon Letters.

^{BOG MYRTLE}

In short, I felt that my growing “success” meant that I had to become more… normal, I guess is the word. Which in turn led to the unnerving feeling that I was building myself yet another treadmill, constantly accelerating as I was trying to keep up. However grateful I am for where my business is now, and however proud I am for having built it on my own, I think it wise to allow yourself a certain amount of reflection and reconsideration, not only when times are hard, but perhaps more so when things are good.

The reawakening of the New Moon Letters is one way for me to move towards being mindfully in charge of how I spend my time. As Annie Dillard famously wrote in her 1989 book The Writing Life:

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

I am excited to be writing these letters again. I often find that nothing is truly thought through until I have written about it, and this format allows me to observe myself both from the inside and from the outside. It’s not a journal, but a letter – it requires you, the reader, to be fulfilled.

^{A PLACE TO GET LOST BY THE MIRE}

For those of you who have never read one of my New Moon Letters before, let me introduce them: on each new moon, I write a letter. That’s both the simplest and fullest declaration of intent. They all come from the land where I live: in a not too special forest in the south-east of Sweden, with trees and lakes and birds and very shifting seasons. This is what is unique to my place in the world, but what doesn’t change is the moon phases. The new moon is the new moon on the Northern and Southern hemisphere, even if one has summer and the other is deep in winter. If you are spiritually inclined, the days around the new moon are seen as a good time to reflect and set intentions.

Going forward I would love to hear more from you. What did you like most about the New Moon Letters, if you received them, and what would you like to read about in future letters?

Here’s what I’m thinking right now:

• Creativity is a big thing for me, and I would love to think more about what creativity is, what being creative does to our brains and lives, how inspiration and motivation connect and where they come from, and how the world is a more beautiful, fun and better place because of creative people doing creative things.

• Crafts are, for me, an embodied practice of knowledge, heritage and place, and this is a topic very dear to me. Of course there will be a lot of talk about knitting and designing knitwear patterns, but there are so many wonderful crafts to learn more about. I spin, embroider, paint and draw now and then, and I’ve been wanting to set up my loom and start weaving. There is the dormant craft of metalsmithing I used to devote so much of my time to, and so many things I haven’t tried yet: paper marbling, book binding, whittling, woodturning, ceramics… endless possibilities!

• Living in nature is at the heart of everything I write, that which comes first and seeps into everything else. I am not particularly adventurous and don’t live in a place with extraordinary views, and I love using this in my writing: how our attention and appreciation make seemingly ordinary things beautiful.

• Journal ideas and prompts for those who – like me – wish to explore how putting things into words and answering questions in writing can help us become more attentive to whatever we want to focus on.

I hope these topics feel as important and exciting for you as they do for me! Going forward, I’m considering adding more writing (I would love to write more about running a creative solo-business, for example), test knitting opportunities and pattern discounts for paid Substack subscribers – much like my old Patreon page. We’ll see where this goes. For now, it feels really good to pick up the New Moon Letter thread once again. The option to become a paid subscriber is already there, for those of you who wish to support my work from the very start.

Before I sign off this letter, I would like to give you the first hint of something I’ve been working on for a long time, and that I just know that many of you will love. I hope to tell you all about it in just a short while but couldn’t wait to show you this , even if I don’t want to get ahead of myself before this plan of mine is set firmly in motion. But… if you’re like me and love natural fibres, and want to hear more about this exciting big project of mine, keep your eyes peeled. Or as we say in Swedish: keep your raven gapers open (håll korpgluggarna öppna).

I leave you today with a bit of Midsummer lore from Värend, my home county here in south-eastern Sweden, taken from the magnificent Wärend och Wirdarne by Gunnar Olof Hylén-Cavallius, 1863-1868:

“Då bör allehanda löf och blomster, men framför allt Johannesgräs (Hypericum) plockas och hopbindas till midsommar-qvastar, hvilka upphängas i husen och i ladugråden, – det senare, på det ingen må ha makt att förgöra boskapen. Alla örter och blomster till läkedom för menniskor och djur må denna afton samlas, om de eljest skola ha sin fulla kraft, och efter forntida sed upphemtas då äfven midsommarsdagg, som sedan lägges i degen när man bakar bröd. […] Samma natt skall ock vakas, och om någon tigandes och fastandes då går ut tull en kors-väg, ter sig för honom vålnaden af hans tillkommande fästemö eller fästeman.”

This paragraph explains what one should, and shouldn’t, do on Midsummer: it’s important to pick leaves and flowers and tie brooms for the houses, barns and stables so that no harm can come to the animals. Medicinal herbs and plants should be picked as they are most potent, and an ancient tradition tells us to go out on the morning after Midsummer and collect the dew and use it when baking bread. And for anyone looking for a bit of night time adventure, Hyltén-Cavallius describes how you in the middle of the night can walk out to a crossroads, silent and fasting, to see the apparition of your true love. (He also notes that anyone who picks even a blade of grass on Midsummer day is in danger of getting “likmasken och kräftan”, maggots and cancer. )

In spite of this advice, I’ll spend Midsummer morning picking flowers for wreaths. There will be dancing around the flower pole, pickled herring and potatoes, and I’m bringing my 94 year old grandmother along for the celebrations.

However your Midsummer (or Midwinter!) and solstice season looks, I hope that you get to smile and eat and make something.

Until the next new moon,

Lotta