Gerda Rasmussen turns gourds into hanging...

Gerda Rasmussen turns gourds into hanging mobiles and wrist bracelets, leather into 11-piece outfits, and yarn into exotic soft sculptures riddled with trinkets found at swap meets and import stores. Her wearable art and fiber designs are exhibited in juried art shows and appear in how-to books on creative stitchery. She was arts and crafts director on a cruise ship and teaches classes in San Diego and Hawaii. Her success with the needle, however, was unimaginable to the 61-year-old artist a decade ago. Rasmussen studied with sculptor Donal Hord and taught sculpting to adults in the 1960s. She made sculptures and mosaics for public buildings and 50 private collections in the United States and abroad. But her career with clay screeched to a halt in 1975 when she learned that the fumes from the kiln she fired in her studio had poisoned her with lead. Despondency gave way to excitement when she discovered a new avenue for her artistry. Effusive in the brilliant colors she stitches into body adornments, the Dane who moved to the United States in the late ‘50s and settled in San Diego with her husband 26 years ago, displays her creative history from clay to fiber in the Sunset Cliffs home that is a private museum of her works. Times staff writer Nancy Reed interviewed her and John Fung photographed her.

My life turned completely around. People say God doesn’t close a door without opening another one. That’s how I feel about my lead poisoning. It has been a blessing in disguise.

When I found out, I thought I might as well lay down and die. A friend said I should go down to the stitchery guild, and I said no. Then I saw a book where you take a piece of cardboard and wrap some yarn around and you make a tassel. And that is how it started. I went completely wild, and I thought, gee, that is interesting.

Then I sold the tassels, and it just mushroomed.

Now I travel to teach. I have met so many interesting people. When I am on the plane, if it is an 11-hour plane to Scandinavia, the stewardesses and pilots come out, sit down and do tassels with me. When I was working on the (cruise ship), there were little old ladies from Texas who waited for me each day--they were so excited to make a tassel.

At the grocery store, people say, where did you buy that handbag?

People say it must be irritating that people always want to look you over and talk to you. But I want to share it with the world because it makes people happy.

Fiber art is just a needle and a thread and you just go ahead and do it. You see, the thing is, back in Denmark when you are 7 years old, you have to learn how to crochet and knit and make a chemise and cut a hole in it and mend it. It was boring. And it was right, and straight, and even--no curves. I didn’t crochet again until two years ago.

Because I learned so much about balance and design with Donal Hord, I carry that over into my artwork. I learned all about the bones and muscles--it was very, very, hard work to do. In a way, it is more fun to do the fiber; there is no right or wrong, you just kind of go with the flow.

In a handbag, it has to have that flowing and sweeping look. As Donal Hord used to say, if it looks like it was easy, it’s OK. It shouldn’t look like, oh that’s real hard to do. I have over a hundred hours in my handbags. I cannot just leave it if it doesn’t flow all the way around.

How do you know when something is finished? He said, “It is never finished, I just have to get away from it.” And that was true with the sculpture.

With fiber, I can say, now, it’s finished.

When I was a little girl on the farm in Denmark, I would say, I want to be an artist, and my father would say, get out and pick potatoes. To them, that was not a job. All the years I grew up, I really thought I must be very strange. I am the richest person in the world in San Diego--there are so many materials I had never seen in Denmark.

Back there, they dressed kind of dull--gray and brown--and I would always like to dress in colors. I am a purple girl.

FO