Thyra Grafström (1864-1925) opened her textile atelier in Stockholm on Birger Jarlsgatan in 1897. Born Inga Thyra Carola Boklund, daughter of the painter and museum curator Johan Christoffer Boklund, she trained at the technical college that became Konstfack, studied painting under Kerstin Cardon, and worked from 1882 for Handarbetets Vänner.
Soumak
Anna Maria Hoke, born Ann-Mari Ericsson, was a Swedish weaver and designer who took the name Hoke on marrying in about 1942. She had an established reputation before joining the Gävleborg county society: she worked for Värmlands Hemslöjd from 1938 to 1940 and for Västmanlands Hemslöjd from 1952 to 1954, designing carpets for the latter.
NK:s Textilkammare was the textile department of Nordiska Kompaniet, the Stockholm department store, founded in 1936. From 1937 until 1971 it was led by Astrid Sampe, and under her it became the most internationally minded centre for modern textile design in Sweden.
Jönköpings Läns Hemslöjd is the county handicraft society of Jönköping, in south-central Sweden, and one of the regional societies of the Swedish hemslöjd movement.
Bohusslöjd was the handicraft association of Gothenburg and Bohus county. It was founded in Gothenburg on 15 February 1906 as Hemslöjdsföreningen Konstfliten, took the name Bohusslöjd-Konstfliten in the 1940s, and was later known simply as Bohusslöjd. It went bankrupt in January 2010 and closed the following month, after more than a century.
Gävleborgs Läns Hemslöjd was the county handicraft society for Gävleborg, in eastern Sweden, within the national hemslöjd movement; six local societies in the county belong to the federation today.
The county societies commissioned rugs and textiles from weavers in their districts and sold them under the society's own mark. In Swedish, län is county and hemslöjd is the craft society, so a name of this kind identifies the province a rug was woven in, and the initials on the piece do the same in short.
Föreningen för Svensk Hemslöjd was founded in Stockholm in 1899 by the textile artist Lilli Zickerman, the first national handicraft association in Sweden. Its board was chaired by Prince Eugen and included the artist Ottilia Adelborg and the women's rights campaigner Elisabeth Tamm.
Kiikan Kutomo - the weaving works at Kiikka, in south-west Finland - produced flatwoven rugs to designs by named Finnish textile artists, among them Laila Karttunen and Greta Skogster-Lehtinen, who is also represented in this collection. Pieces are generally dated to the 1920s and 1930s.
Kristianstads Läns Hemslöjd was the handicraft society of Kristianstad county in eastern Skåne, one of the regional associations that grew up around the Swedish hemslöjd movement, and it ran an active weaving programme of its own. Designers who worked for it include Ingrid Dessau, who was a freelance designer to the society, and Kerstin Mauritzon, who worked there in the years before 1953.
Märta Måås-Fjetterström (1873-1941)