nerdy Swedish crafts in San Francisco

While I was in San Francisco there was an Etsy labs event at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art, connected to the Open Source Embroidery exhibit. I put it on my list of things I really wanted to do in our short time there, and yay, we made it happen! I spend a lot of time at etsy.com, so I knew I'd like something organized by Etsy people.

We got to the entrance and behind the desk there was this knitted poster:


We were looking at it with squinty eyes and the woman working there said "you won't be able to read it, it's in Swedish." ha ha haaaaa, because my guy is Swedish. He didn't get it because it is a knitting pattern, knit into the ..... knitting! I almost had it figured out before she said that.

Turns out that the exhibit came from Sweden! It was mixing fibre arts with technology. Here's a quilt of text messages embroidered onto different fabrics. The texts are in English, Swedish, Norwegian and Spanish:

So the picture quality isn't great, but I like them so I can practice. I like to read stuff that Swedish people write casually, because that helps me learn how they really speak, which I don't really get in my workbooks.

There was also an embroidered motherboard:

An HTML colour quilt, it was spectacular:

A chair you could embroider on while sitting in it, listening to the iPod woven into the armrest:

And other cute textile art, like this: