Bio: Sharon Moe Marquardt has been weaving since the mid-1980s. Inspired by her sister’s summer/winter cow runner, she studied rigid heddle one and two-heddle loom techniques from the Prairie Wool Companion, edited and authored by David and Alexis Xenakis. She used her notes to teach rigid heddle classes at the Weaving Works and Experimental College in Seattle. Moving to her home state of Minnesota, she taught these classes at several weaving conferences. At one conference, she discovered Syvilla Tweed Bolson’s vendor table and later signed up for her boundweave class in Decorah, Iowa. These lessons led to a life-long pursuit of learning Scandinavian techniques. She has studied at Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum, in Norway, and at the Hemslöjden in Landskrona, Skåne, Sweden.

Description: At Vesterheim I learned the decorative West Coast weaves from Marta Kløve Juuhl, who has explored almost-forgotten weaves from Norway, Iceland and the Shetlands. She is the main curator at the husflid in Osterøy, west of Bergen. I wove the smaller colorful hanging based on her lessons. Heidi Goldberg, art professor at Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota, asked me to assist with the weaving section in her traditional Nordic Arts classes. I taught the West Coast weaves first on backstrap looms and then on small warp-weighted looms that my husband had made based on the loom I had purchased at the Sami Husflid (handcraft store).

Read more about the loom that Sharon developed in this Norwegian Textile Letter article: “Developing a Loom to Teach Scandinavian Weaving,” and about her creative use of rya for creating an image in Sharon Marquardt: Using Traditional Voss Rye Technique–to Depict Show Shoveling?, August 2020.

Regarding the Scandinavian Weavers Group: The Scandinavian study group has been my main support for decades. I live in a small rural area where hardly anybody weaves. I’ve traveled to meetings, but with Zoom now available I can attend most of them. Mange takk to this group!

shmarquardt@gmail.com