Wood Clogs and Recreating a Painting

This week has been frustrating for an unusual reason. Clutter. My office at work is filled with projects that I need to do. There is hardly any floor or counter space due to the volume of tasks to be done. 

One of the tasks was finding this pair of child-size wooden clogs that I used as part of a Christmas display. A co-worker had uploaded the information about them into CollectiveAccess and the next step was for me to photograph them so they could be added to the digital record. The challenge: I couldn't find the shoes. 

I searched everywhere in the collections storage area and throughout my office (or so I thought). I finally found them on Saturday afternoon - tucked in a box with the note: Ready to be Photographed. 

Working in such a chaotic-appearing environment has to change. It is known that clutter has a detrimental effect on mental well-being and can lead to feelings of anxiety and overwhelm. Studies have linked office clutter to increased emotional exhaustion, heightened stress, and reduced job satisfaction.

Equally important is that having a disorganized office can create a negative impression on visitors, volunteers, and other staff members. I just need a block of time - uninterrupted - to get things done. 

Anyway...on a more positive note, there was a location scout and film crew who came to the museum this past week with the goal of wanting to recreate a Carl Larsson painting (see below).

Although the building color is different in the back, we did have a birch tree and building from the 1800s that they liked. Hopefully, it works out, and they will return in Spring 2026 to film the scene.

Other than that, it has been raining for the past two days and is smoky due to the Canadian wildfires. Things should dry out by tomorrow and the smoke should dissipate by tomorrow afternoon. 

The irises are blooming - lots of purple irises and two-colored ones (white and purple, and yellow and purple). The yellow irises that my parents had at their home are blooming, and the bleeding hearts are still going strong.

A mother deer and her fawn walked down the driveway yesterday. They disappeared into the pasture before I had a chance to take their photo. Hopefully, they will be back.

Saw a wren and cedar waxwing today. The waxwing was in the crabapple tree, eating the little red apples. 

One of the big rabbits was in the driveway and front lawn. 

I love seeing all the wildlife here. It is one of the highlights of the day for me. 

Update from August 2023 to May 2025

 The last time I wrote was August 2023 - two months after I became the Associate Director of Gammelgården Museum. Between then and now, I have become the Executive Director of the museum (since January 2024). 

These 21 months have been exciting, challenging, and rewarding. I've had opportunities to oversee the historic restoration of a 1930s building, revamp the way the museum presents exhibits, improve the way artifacts are stored, began the digitization of the museum's collection by using a collections management system that not only benefits the museum, but that the public can see on MNCollections.

We have had many major community events that have grown in size from a couple hundred of people in 2023 to over 1,000 people in 2024. Our Season Opening Day this year had over 960 people - up from about 250 last year. 

The number of staff and interns are increasing which enables us to accomplish even more. 

With all of the good, though, comes the loss of balance and free time. I have struggled with trying to find the things that I once enjoyed - photography, gardening, quilting, and having enough time to spend with my family. My goal is to get my life in better balance during the 2025 season. 

Below are some photos that I have taken recently. I've taken more photos on my camera which I have yet to download to my computer. There's not enough time it seems. 

At any rate, here are some photos that represent my life over the past year.

I have been photographing artifacts at the museum so we have a digital record of each one that staff and volunteers can use plus the public can see. Below is a courting candleholder. 

At the museum's Season Opening Day, we had farm animals from Little Blue's Traveling Zoo. This is Melvin. He's a Scottish Highland Cow. The stuffed cow is something that we bought for the museum as one of our mascots. This breed of cow is the only one that legally can be kept outdoors during the winter in Sweden. 

One of the things that is important to me is providing training opportunities for tour guides. Below is the meeting in April with our returning and new tour guides. It's in the classroom where the main exhibit is shown (which was still being installed at this point).

Scandia Fire & Rescue held a fire extinguisher training so tour guides and staff could get experience with using them. 

Here's another item in the museum's collection that I photographed. It is one of hundreds of Charlotte Weibull dolls in the collection. These are all handmade dolls, some representing different provinces in Sweden.

During January through April 2025, I was photographing and entering information about artwork and other artifacts into CollectiveAccess. This had never been done. Now, we have over 660 items in the collection that are in the database. This is just a fraction of what we have. I was told we had about 3,500 items. 

In doing this project (along with another co-worker), over 37% of the items entered were not accessioned prior to my start as the Associate Director/Executive Director - which means information about the item was never recorded. So, we have no idea how the piece was acquired or any history about it. 

In March, I drove to Kansas for an open-air museum conference which was informative and relevant to what I am doing now. One of the classes I enjoyed taking was about historic shoes. This is a sampling of shoes and tools that were used to make and repair them.

This photo shows how the soles of shoes were attached to the vamps/uppers - by pegs. These are all little wooden pegs that went around the perimeter of the shoe.

Another class I attended at the conference related to condiments used in the 1800s. 

During the conference, there was an opportunity to visit the Arabia Steamboat Museum which was a fascinating museum. This is one of the pairs of shoes that were restored and are on display. During our visit, we had the opportunity to go behind the scenes to see the restoration and cold storage areas. They are still working on the hundreds of artifacts that are in cold storage. 

 

Part of the open-air museum conference was held at Mahaffie Stagecoach Stop in Olathe, Kansas. It's a nice facility with well-presented exhibits. I particularly enjoyed seeing the farm animals, including this sheep. 

 

I also had the opportunity to visit the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library. Not having ever visited a Presidential Library, I didn't know what to expect. The exhibits were fascinating and I learned a tremendous amount while there. 

Back at the museum, I was purchasing items for the current exhibit, including this print of a watercolor by a Swedish artist. 

In March, Sophia and I took care of my grandnieces for a couple of weekends. We had some craft projects for them to work on which they enjoyed doing. 

We took them to the museum. I was surprised to hear they had never been to a museum, so this was a good experience for them to see what one was like. Maya enjoyed the wool processing exhibit. 

We taught the girls how to make pancakes. Maya learned how to crack an egg which she was proud about doing.

We played games with the girls as the dogs, Danny and Ellie, wanted to be a part of the action. 

We visit the St. Croix River. There was still ice on part of the river (look to the right of the photo). Surprisingly, there were people already fishing on the section with open water.

In February, I went to Karpeles Manuscript Library on my way to Grand Marais. I had never been to this museum and it was well worth the stop. There were documents and images that have been collected by a family that are being shared with the public. This one was from Martin Luther King, Jr.

Karpeles also had a display about historic telephones. This one was an unusual one.

In Grand Marais, I took a class about Swedish embroidery. I was impressed with this 3D installation that was done by various art/education instructors - each depicting a different craft or skill taught at North House.

My hotel room faced Lake Superior and one morning there was smoke coming off the water. It was beautiful.

During the embroidery class, we made pouches that could hold embroidery tools - scissors, needles, pins, and a small project. My project is on the far right - the purple one. 

One of the projects that I am happy about is the non-lending resource library that we created at the museum. There were literally hundreds of books that were never accessioned into the collection. If they are not historic or fragile, they were put in this library for the public to browse and read. Some of the books are in English and others in Swedish. 

I also created a Board and Card Game Library - something that is new to the museum and community. People can come to the museum to play a game. The goal is to get away from technology and do something fun with friends and/or family.

Here's another piece I purchased for the museum. It is over six feet tall and is all hand-felted. It's two birch trees which are significant to both the Ojibwe and Swedish immigrants who lived in this area. 

Winter always seems to offer stunning sunsets. 

This is Ellie with the girls at Christmas 2024. She is our newest dog after multiple and unexpected deaths of pets from 2022 through 2024 (Scooby - November 2022 from some type of weird bacterial/viral infection that got progressively worse; Aspen - December 2023 went in for surgery to remove three masses. When she was recovering from surgery, she was anxious and doing a lot of panting, and - to make a long story short - developed a twisted stomach which was too far along by the time we got her to an emergency hospital, and Cooper January 2024 from Hemangiosarcoma - a type of cancer that only dogs get. No one knew he had it - us or the vet).

On a more positive note, this is what the museum's second floor looked like at Christmas. This exhibit had lots of different mini-themes that showed what the holidays in Sweden look like. The tables are set for the Luciadagen breakfast that was served after the program in the Old Church. 

From August 2024 to March 2025, we had kitten - Juniper - who we rescued from being outdoors. She was by herself, tiny, and hungry. She lived with us and had an active and full life until the last week in March. She developed a neurological condition that would have severely impaired her life. Her condition appeared almost as if she had a stroke. The emergency vet said she would have had seizures for the rest of her life, be unable to walk steadily due to issues on her left side, etc. It was devastating. 

The girls and a couple of their friends doing the annual puzzle competition at the museum.

Sophia brought Olivia her birthday cake to celebrate her 22nd birthday.

Sophia helped serve food for a volunteer and member appreciation event at the museum in January 2025.

My sister and nephew were at the volunteer and member appreciation event. 

This was Juniper at Christmas 2024. She received gifts...just like everyone else did. She loved playing with the crumpled-up paper.

Danny was intrigued with the gifts at Christmas. His favorite gift was the one for him: dog treats!

Sophia helped at the coffee parties at the museum. I appreciated her help during the busy holiday season. 

Just a final photo of Olivia with Maya and Emma plus Melvin the Scottish Highland Cow who, interestingly, was afraid of the stuffed Scottish Highlight Cow. 

And...there we have it. An update from August 2023 to May 2025. Certainly this didn't include everything that happened, but it was a glimpse into this period of time. 

My Favorite Photos - July 2023

July seemed to fly by...most of spent working, though. So, I am happy to have had at least some quality time with family. The highlight of July was that my niece and her family moved back to Minnesota from North Carolina. 

We were able to have dinner, talk, and play games together in early July.

We've been having a lot of birds at our feeders. The grosbeaks love the seeds.

This is the male rose-breasted grosbeak. He's a lot more colorful than the female pictured above.

The wrens raised a brood of little ones. They have since fledged. I miss seeing the constant traffic and singing of the wrens each day.

We had many orioles this year and went through bottles of grape jelly. This one is a much darker orange than what we typically see.

This is another type of oriole we saw. It is still beautiful, just not as dark-orange as the other one. 

This wren caught a spider to bring back to the babies. The mother and father wren are such hard - and successful - foragers.

 We have a variety of woodpeckers here. This one is about mid-size compared to the other ones we see.

One of my favorite things to see here are deer. These two fawns somehow got into our fenced-in backyard. We found out that even as young as these two were, that fawns can easily scale a four-foot fence. 

This one was more curious and alert of the two fawns.

This fawn liked to eat more than the other one.

The mother was on the other side of the fence and had an eye on her babies until she walked around the corner and then along the fence line. She jumped into the east pasture and later on her two fawns joined her by jumping over the fence. 

This is one of the sunflowers that grew from a seed that fell from the birdfeeder. The birds now - a month later - are eating the seeds from it.

This is one of the dahlias that I grew this year from a root. It has bloomed quite a bit which I've enjoyed.

These little flowers come up every year by the back door. I need to cut the plant back throughout the summer and fall, otherwise it would take over the garden. 

We celebrated Olivia's 20 1/2 birthday in July. We still celebrate half birthdays. I don't think that will stop. 

We scaled back on the number of gifts, though, compared to past years. Two of the gifts we gave her was a Dala horse from Sweden and a silver Dala horse necklace. She really liked both gifts.

During July, we had a Girls & Dolls Tea Party at work. This is one of the dolls in a collection - a Swedish Easter Witch. Girls dress up around Easter as witches and paint their cheeks pink and put a lot of dots on their faces to represent freckles. 

Also at work is a collection of Charlotte Weibull dolls. These are two of them wearing the folk outfits from different provinces in Sweden.

Olivia entered ten projects in the county fair for her final year in 4-H. She received all blue ribbons and one reserve champion ribbon on the nautilus pictured below. It's a Diamond Dotz painting that turned out beautifully. She paid for the matting and framing which complement it nicely. 

Although she won a trip to the State Fair with this project, she decided not to go because it would be the same project area (Crafts) and with a similar project that she did last year (also a Diamond Dotz, but with a different image).

After the last day of the County Fair, we went to Dairy Queen - our traditional meal. A bittersweet meal knowing this is the last 4-H year and the last County Fair as a 4-H family.

When we came home from the County Fair, the mother deer was hiding behind a tree. She finally came out from behind the tree along with her two fawns. I love knowing that she feels safe here. She and the babies didn't rush away when they saw us. They watched us for a while and then walked off slowly. They know we are not a threat. 

My sister went to an art museum in late-July. This is one of the glass pieces in the collection.

This was a two-dimensional painting that looks three-dimensional. 

I liked this glass and metal piece. The shades of blue were beautiful.

This is a glass and cement piece. The inner part is cement and outer part is glass.

This glass piece I thought was a tube - like the kind that were outside of the Minnesota Orchestra building decades ago. It isn't. It's a solid piece with a light color of glass in the middle. It is probably about three inches wide from the front to the back. Every few steps I took past this piece, it would have a different look to it. 

These pairs look like regular-size pears, but they're not. They are about three feet tall. The subtle color on the side is from sprinkling powdered glass on the sculpture. 

At work, we have ten bluebird houses. This nest was placed well because it attracted two bluebird families. So we had ten bluebirds born this year! 

Here are some baby bluebirds later in the month. They fledged by the end of the month.

One of the projects I'm especially pleased with at work was creating four sensory kits and a box of fidgets for people with autism and sensory issues. These are all the items we purchased.

This is an example of a sensory kit that someone can check out from the museum while they are visiting. They bring it back when they are ready to go home. 

That wraps up July. I'm hoping that as the summer winds down that there will be more balance between family/home and work. Right now, it's out of balance which is challenging.