North House Folk School

I am writing this on my last full day of my big trip in Scandinavia—day 22. I am on the train from Oslo back to Stockholm, where I fly out early tomorrow morning. It is late afternoon and sunny, and I am enjoying watching the countryside roll by my train window while listening to Jon Batiste’s Meditations album. I know I will be thinking about things I have seen and the people I have met on this trip for many years to come. I hope to come back to Scandinavia on another research trip. Life is so full and rich, and traveling is such a privilege. I am grateful to North House, Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, and to my many hosts and new friends for this opportunity. I am equally grateful to my family for the flexibility to allow me to take such a very long time away. This has been a very meaningful experience for me. 

Early on, I was given advice (thanks to North House instructors Fred Livsay and Lisel Chatman) to not over-plan my trip: to go with the flow and see where that took me.  Staying open to new experiences and new perspectives has been wonderful, and it’s something I hope to continue with as I transition back to life as a family man and craftsperson.  

Visiting Sätergläntan, North House's "sister school" in the Dalarna region

Inspired by Color

The new experience and altered perspective I want to share with you today is what I noticed about color on this trip. Immediately on getting to Stockholm I started to notice colors, and I was surprised to be a little obsessed by the repeating themes I saw.  Hopefully I didn’t annoy my travel companions, but I often exclaimed over colors and ran over for a closer look. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised; I had primed the pump a little by recently reading Josef Albers' Interaction of Color and Kassia St. Clair’s The Secret Life of Colour. (Thanks to North House instructor Jim Sannerud for the Albers recommendation.) 

First, I will share some familiar color landscapes before moving on to the surprising colors that I saw all over the place.

Familiar Colors

Falun Red is ubiquitous outside of the cities in the areas I visited. On the North Shore, we call it Lunde Red after the famous architect Edwin H. Lunde. In Grand Marais, the Fisherman’s Daughter restaurant and North House’s Red Building are painted a shade of red similar to Falun Red. This red with white trim seems to be on 90% of the buildings in rural Sweden and the parts of Norway I saw by train. I found out that this red is made from a byproduct of the copper mining in Dalarna. The other 10% of buildings were mostly a dusty yellow, which is similar to the new yellow building on the North House campus.  

Seeing these colors was familiar and comfortable, as they were colors I am used to seeing at home. That said, I was struck by how beautiful this familiar color was in its setting. So many of the red buildings have so much history; they were carefully placed into the landscape in a time when living closer to the land and considering wind direction and sun exposure was a matter of course. All that adds up to a lot of great patina and variations on a familiar theme. I felt privileged to see villages and farms full of these weathered buildings placed just so.  

Finding My New Green

The surprising color I started to search out is this Pistachio Green. I can’t wait to get back to my shop so I can try to mix up my version of this color I keep seeing. I have so many pictures of times that I found this color in the wild on this trip.

Examples of my new green throughout Sweden. Bench by Jogge Sundqvist. 

I feel that this green is best viewed on fabrics. Something about the depth, layers, and how fabrics absorb light shows this green to the best effect.

Pistachio green textiles found while traveling

I think duplicating these layers with my milk paint will be a good challenge. To get this green, I am going to have to layer it over a base coat of yellow, but maybe the birch will have enough yellow tones to give the green the punch I am looking for. I really like it and hope to create a custom mix of milk paint and feature it as my 2025 color of the year. Back in December at the Julmarknad sale at the American Swedish Institute, I first encountered this pistachio green color on some wool felt purses that were for sale at the market, and I knew at that point that I had to find how to mix it and get it on my bowls. 

Teal bowl by Cooper Ternes

Last year I fell in love with this deep teal color that I created, and I think the new green and the deep teal are going to look good next to each other. Finding this green so often in the “wild” made me so happy; it’s a color I hadn’t been finding when at home in Grand Marais in the midst of a snowy winter.  

Finding pistachio green "in the wild"

While walking around in Stockholm, people were out and enjoying the good  weather, everyone was making sure they looked good. There is a very urban sensibility to wearing mostly black. So, walking around, I was part of a sea of mostly black coats and hats. While in this sea of somber colors, I kept noticing people who incorporated a splash of color into their outfit. It seemed to me that this playful pop of color was used to show their pleasure in the day. Sometimes it was a silk scarf and sometimes it was a lovely knit hat or mittens. The splashes of color were more stark because of their backdrop of black wool coats and narrow cobbled streets. Finding a way to express my joy outwardly seemed like a natural outcome, so I found this silk scarf at a Stockholm thrift shop, and I wore it for the rest of the trip to remind me to enjoy the beauty of the day and to find ways to be part of it. 

Scarf in my new green, found at a Stockholm thrift shop. Hat knit by my wife Erika Ternes

In my next blog post, I am going to talk about tradition and living amongst craft items made by people like Bengt Lidstrom, an architect and bowl carver, or spoon carver and bowl turner Willie Sundquist. Even though I never got to meet Wille or Bengt, they have had an impact on my life and craft. In my next blog post, I will share the story of how I encountered these craftsmen while in Umea, northern Sweden.