During winter, when there isn’t much to be done in the garden, I spend more time on crafts. Last winter season I made an advent calendar in felt and started knitting a cardigan. The cardigan is still not done, because during this winter season I focused more on interior decorating. Time to finally make some curtains for this house!

We have nine sets of windows that “need” curtains. (I don’t think the storage closet needs any, and the glass wall in the living room is not going to get curtains either.) The bathroom window already had one, which leaves eight. I managed to sew curtains for four of them, so I’m halfway there. Perhaps next winter I will get the rest done.

The “office” was first in line because I wanted to be able to get rid of the glare on our computer screens. Thick, lined, but otherwise un-fancy curtains in a fabric that matches the art nouveau and early-1900s inspiration I’ve generally been following in this house: Sandberg’s Lily of the Valley.

The curtains for our bedroom are similar in style and construction. If your memory is really sharp, you may recognize the fabric: this is the curtain I made for the balcony door back in 2008. Back then I expected it to hang there for the next 15 or 20 years. The door itself only survived for less than three more years, but the curtain got a second life. I removed the tabs at the top, made a twin for it, and now it hangs in our bedroom. I am hesitant to make another prediction about its expected life, but I hope it will be long. The fabric: Sandberg’s Louise.

Actually, the twin is not quite a twin. Or maybe it’s a fraternal twin. The new fabric I ordered did not quite match the old one: one is more beige and the other is more gray. Maybe the old one changed colour in the sun? Maybe in a couple of years they will be indistinguishable. But during the day the curtains are apart, and at night nobody looks at them, so the mismatch doesn’t bother me at all.

The curtains in Ingrid’s bedroom are of a very different style… We looked at photos of curtains online and Ingrid had a very clear idea about what hers should look like. Patterned, but with a small pattern, “like maybe hearts or rings”. Ideally violet or lilac or something like that, or maybe blue. And tied back with nice bows, and with a valance. It took a while to find the fabric because this is not exactly in line with current decorating trends, but Ingrid was very happy with the result. She likes to untie the bows for the night.

And finally, some cushions. We had a set of three old cushions in dark green linen that I sewed in 1997 when I moved in with Eric, and they were really at the end of their life. There were actual holes in the fabric. These new ones are in dark brown wool felt, decorated with fabric in traditional Estonian patterns. My working name for the set is “Rebel yellow”. One of them I made after Ingrid’s wishes – can you guess which one?

PS: If you can’t make the numbers add up – office + bedroom + Ingrid’s room equals three, not four, right? – it’s because the office has two large windows which I count as two, not one.

At this point I am second-guessing just about everything in all the photos I take, but something is better than nothing, and this is better than what I’ve managed before.

I’ve been spending more time and effort on photography recently, and would now say it’s one of my main hobbies. (Along with blogging, textile crafts, and gardening.) In general I’m making an effort to balance all the “must do’s” in my life with more fun and creative activities. All work and no play makes Helen a cranky mum.

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded my camera, from a Nikon D40x to a D3200. The new one does video (which I haven’t had a chance to try out yet) and has 11 autofocus points instead of 3, plus various other nice features.

Along with the new hardware I also decided that it was time to learn new things. Previously I mostly used shutter priority or aperture priority modes; now I’ve switched to manual mode most of the time. I also switched from shutter button focusing to back-button focusing, and from auto white balance to the preset modes. (I don’t quite feel up to managing fully manual white balance yet.)

Using manual mode has been working out much better than I expected. I don’t always nail the exposure but the results are at least no worse than before. And the photos turn out more predictable and consistent: previously every photo in a batch would use slightly different settings, because the camera decide to slightly tweak some setting or other, but now they’re all the same, which makes post-processing faster.

Manual mode requires more thinking and effort, which is both good and bad. Every photo takes more time, so I miss some shots because I’m too slow. But it requires me to pay more attention to what I’m doing, and makes the whole thing more interesting. Just enough of a challenge.

The more I practice, the less I like what I achieve, and the more I see how much there is for me to learn. But whenever I feel discouraged, like I’m not getting anywhere, I scroll down to my photos from a year ago and look at how much I’ve learned since then. Look at those chopped limbs! Look at the weird framing! Look at the missed lighting opportunity – why didn’t I take that picture from the other side!

One particular project that I want to tackle is self-portraits. I’m the only one who regularly takes photos in our family, which means that I have lots of photos of the kids (whom I see most), some of Eric (who is at home less) and almost none of myself. Twenty years from now the kids will be able to see what they looked like, but not what I looked like. It’s like I was missing from the family.

It turns out that you really need a tripod for effective self-portraits. I’ve tried to make do without, but it’s hard, and really limits the angles I can use. (For the photo below, for example, I would normally not have faced the direction I’m facing, but the only support I found for my camera was a pile of books on my desk.) So now I’m thinking of buying a tripod. And perhaps some more prime lenses, too… The purchase of one piece of gear triggers a cascade of others.

I’ve also realized that our style of interior decoration – with colour and patterned wallpapers – and the general clutter we have everywhere is not helpful for getting good photos. The colours and wallpapers will stay, because I value this warm, colourful atmosphere more than I value having convenient backdrops for photography. But the clutter I can do something about. Case in point: these cupboards really need doors.

Ingrid and I made chestnut critters this year again.

Back row, from the left: Rabbit, giraffe, snow man.
Front row: Elephant, hedgehog, six-legged dog, space alien looking for a hug.

Today we actually managed to visit a museum. Yay!

The exhibition I wanted to see was 100 Years of Swedish Handicraft. I had a very vague idea about the actual contents of the exhibition – modern takes on traditional crafts was what I thought it was about. Which was technically correct but really didn’t describe the reality very well.

The exhibition turned out to have two distinct parts. Part one was a number of thematic rooms with crafts that mostly combined modern design and ideas with traditional techniques. Woodworking, basket weaving, knitting, embroidery etc. This part was sort of nice but not amazing.

The amazing part was the other one. The other half of the exhibition was called Leaves, and consisted of 2000 wooden leaf-shaped frames that had been decorated by members in various crafts clubs and societies all over Sweden. Each leaf was different, and the variety was incredible. The leaves were arranged in vaguely tree-shaped stands in random order, with no effort to group like with like, which emphasized their variety even more. There were leaves worked in embroidery, knitting, wire, glass, metal, painting… leaves made by young children and by professional designers and craftsmen, leaves made quickly and leaves that must have taken months and months of work, leaves that fit within the organizers’ frames and leaves that broke the rules.

Many craftsters got their ideas from the leaves themselves. Some leaves were simply left to be leaves, beautifully wrought or decorated. Others depicted/were covered with/contained designs of trees, flowers, leaves, etc.

One interesting theme arose from the shape of the frame: its curved shape had led a number of craftsters to interpret it as a womb, and to fill it with a fetus/baby. Another recurring theme was probably born from the fact that the leaf frames were frames: there was a bunch of spiderweb and other web/net designs.

I only wish I could have spent more time and attention on each leaf. With two impatient kids in tow, this was difficult. But there is still more than a month left of the exhibition (until September 2nd) so I am thinking of going back there on my own. And if I do I will make sure to bring my SLR instead of the compact camera I had today.

And to top it all off, all the leaves will be auctioned off on Tradera (the Swedish Ebay equivalent), with proceeds going to charity. I am sorely tempted to buy one, even though (a) I have no idea which one, and (b) I have no idea where I would put it. But there were so many so beautiful things there that I may make the effort to make up my mind.

I was raised a perfectionist. If I didn’t have perfect grades, I sensed mild, baffled disappointment – “What happened? Surely you can do better?” That expectation rooted itself in me and I came to see it as natural, and as my own. So for years I’ve tried to do things as well as I possibly can.

“If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” When I’ve known that I don’t have the time or skill to do something well, I have chosen to not do it.

Now I am finally trying to unlearn that perfectionism and to practice “good enough” instead. “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.”

See that chair makeover in the previous post? The seats of our kitchen chairs were worn out and stained and needed replacing. Reupholstering a seat is not much work: from beginning to end, it took me about an hour per seat. But there are also the backrests. Reupholstering those would require the chair to be disassembled almost completely, and then the actual reupholstering would be a lot fiddlier. I don’t even know exactly how the fabric is attached, but it would almost certainly require more than scissors and a staple gun, probably quite a lot of measuring and sewing. Given all the other tasks and projects on my list, it was clear to me that that just wasn’t going to happen. I could of course also have bought new chairs, or accepted them in their somewhat ugly state. But I opted for a good-enough solution, and reupholstered just the part that actually needed it. So what if the seat fabric now doesn’t match the backrest.

Likewise in the garden. For some time now (like, a couple of years) I’ve wanted to do something with the one and only flowerbed in our garden. To do it properly, we should replace the stones around it, because the lawn is creeping into the flowerbed. And we should probably move them a bit further out because the flowerbed is quite narrow. And we should really mix manure or compost into the soil, which is dry and poor. But… all that would take me an entire weekend, and that’s just not going to happen any time soon. So instead of waiting for that utopian weekend (with no kids to interrupt my work, and decent weather, and nothing more urgent to do) I just bought and planted a bunch of perennials that should hopefully be able to cope with the poor soil, in the narrow space that is there, and then threw in some cheap annuals to get some colour straight away. It’s not perfect, but it’s something, which is way better than nothing.

Our kitchen chairs have a new look.

When I was browsing cardigan patterns for myself, Ingrid saw some photos of cardies with flowers around the neckline and asked if I could make one of those for her. Economizing, I bought a simple cardigan from H&M and just made the flowers myself.

We only decorated a handful of eggs this year. Some we dyed with onion skins, others we painted with watercolours.

The black-and-white one at the front Ingrid made especially for her judo teacher Erik: it is, of course, Erik in his white judo suit and black belt. The idea was his and not ours but it is a fun egg nevertheless.