Day 2 at Djurönäset. Our programme for the day didn’t start until 10 (I guess a significant part of the group were up late and some were probably expected to nurse hangovers) so I had time for a nice, long walk around the place before a late breakfast. The hotel grounds were extensive and there was both a rough and rocky trail with lots of ups and downs, and a flatter running trail.

We’re on a weekend unconference with tretton37 at Djurönäset. We had some organized talks and also a whole afternoon of open space sessions. One interesting session was about ikigai. In another we discussed the growth mindset vs fixed mindset concepts.

There was of course also fika, especially since today is the 10th anniversary of the company, and also quite a lot of free time – some of which we used for walking and admiring the views, and the sunshine.

The hotel has not only a spa but also a full-sized 25-metre swimming pool. Apparently most of the people in our group knew this from ads in the metro, so they came prepared with swimsuits. I hadn’t spent any time reading up on the place so I was unprepared, and disappointed at missing out on this opportunity. I enjoy swimming, and my enjoyment more than doubles when the pool is nearly deserted like this one was. But the hotel had swimsuits for guests to borrow, so I got to swim after all.

I’ve started on the embroidery on my skirt-to-be and it is coming along nicely.

I loved parts of Dragonsbane but found other parts quite annoying and frustrating, so I’m not sure I’ll want to read the rest of the series. (A quartet, not a trilogy, interestingly.)

John is a local lord in a small, isolated, poor northern holding. Jenny, his lover, is a witch/healer/midwife. One day a young noble arrives, seeking John’s help. John, you see, once killed a dragon, and is therefore the only Dragonsbane alive. Now the people in the south need his help killing another one. He only managed to kill the first one with the help of Jenny’s poisons and magic, so she goes with him. And of course the situation turns out to be much more complicated than they expect: the dragon is there for a reason, and that reason might be more of a danger than the dragon itself.

Things I really liked about this book:

• The unheroic hero. Jenny is middle-aged, not pretty, not even described as looking “strong” or “fierce” or “having character”. Or even witchy. Just small and plain. She is disappointed in the weakness of her magic, and frustrated in always having to choose (and not being able to choose once and for all) between spending her time on increasing her magic, or on her lover and children. She doesn’t regret any of her choices, because she couldn’t have done anything differently, but still wishes that things were different. She loves John and her children, but also resents them for taking up so much of her time and keeping her from growing her powers, and feels guilty about her inability to choose. “She should have loved, she thought, either more or less than she had.” All of this is taken seriously and not turned into a funny quirk. She is annoyed and tired in realistic way, rather than entertainingly, wittily grumpy like frustrated people often tend to be in books.
• The unheroic sidekick. John is a Dragonsbane, but neither looks nor acts like the hero that folks in the South expect. He dresses in brown plaids (because the North is both poor and cold and muddy), and he wears spectacles. He’d rather read a book about history than go out hunting dragons. And if he has to kill one, he won’t do it the glorious, honorable way, but would rather sneak up on it after it’s been weakened by Jenny’s poisons.
• Their mature relationship. No dewy-eyed romance, no “will they, won’t they”. A solid, long relationship between mature adults.
• The unheroic mood. This whole book feels like November. It’s muddy and gray and cold and windy. Of course dragons don’t wait for the best adventuring season.

Things I really disliked about this book:

• The ornate similes. Barbara Hambly really, really likes describing colour and light, in as fancy terms as possible. Dew drops don’t just twinkle – “brightness spangles the wet grass like pennies thrown by a careless hand”. Rain pouring from a gutter is “like a string of diamonds in the moonlight”. The metal of John’s jerkin “gleamed like a maker’s mark stamped in gold upon a bolt of velvet”. Descriptions like that are empty posing: they may sound impressive but they do nothing to help me imagine the thing or place described.

  Is the sparkling of the light truly the most essential part of this scene? I wish she spent more time telling me what the city looked like, or the path to the mountains. Several times we are told that the gnomes have light eyes, and their hair is white and wispy like cobweb – but what does the rest of the gnome look like? More about the shape of things, less about the light, please! Jenny is no court poet, she’s a down-to-earth witch!

More mildly I disliked the one-dimensional secondary characters, especially the evil sorceress who turned into more and more of a caricature as the story progressed.

Ingrid, being a teenager, spends more and more of her waking time in her own room, doing her own stuff. I see less of her than I used to.

She does come down when she has a particularly large chunk of particularly boring homework to cram. She enjoys subjects where learning means understanding and reasoning, such as math and science. Even some parts of social studies, such as when they worked with ethics. But subjects such as history and geography on grade school level mostly means cramming facts. Names, years, terms…

The best way for Ingrid to learn those is to tell them to someone else, out loud. Today we did “home skills”. She has a test coming up soon, on the topic of food ingredients: meats, grains, dairy, vegetables etc. So she went through all her notes and told me all the facts. What inner temperature should pork be cooked to? What is margarine? What are pulses? What is the difference between hard cheese and cream cheese? Mostly sort of useful facts, but learning them by heart for a test is maybe not the best way…

First day back at the office.

One of my plants has died. I completely forgot about them during my Christmas break. Oh well.

The first skirt turned out nice so I started on another one. This one will be bolder, in bright red and with embroidery on the front. Same stretchy wool fabric as the first one.

What to embroider, though? That was the difficult question.

Definitely nothing corny like hearts or butterflies or flowers. Vines or leaves, like ivy maybe? No, I have a green skirt that I also want to pimp up, and leaves and vines would look better in green than in red.

An animal of some kind, like the lizard towel I made for my brother? There are lots of cool, clever animals – dragons and cats and ravens and octopuses and elephants. The problem with putting an animal in such a prominent position, though, is that it becomes a statement. (Does in my head, at least.) Cats, for example, are nice – but I don’t care so much about them that I would want my only bold skirt to be a cat skirt. And they’re all a bit cliché as well, somehow, to be personal. Especially since I cannot draw well enough to draw them from scratch. I’d have to google for a picture to start from, and then it would be like wearing clip art on my skirt.

Anything even vaguely symbolic has the same problem. All of it has been appropriated by fashion designers, so it wouldn’t feel mine. I love Celtic knotwork designs, for example, and doodled some of my own many years ago. But now everybody and their dog has a knotwork tattoo.

Something completely abstract, then? Yes.

Circles. Circles are common in both traditional Estonian and Swedish embroidery, which feels fitting. Less common than flowers, but common enough that I’ll be able to find some inspiration. Circles it’ll be.

This decision was followed by lots of experimenting with cardboard circles. I like tangible design tools, digital sketching is not for me.

Like this? Fewer? Larger? More filled or more empty?

A second Christmas, with the extended Bergheden family.

Adrian on the skating rink, with a friend.

Surprisingly often he’s sitting or kneeling on the ice. It’s not that he can’t skate, or won’t skate. He does. But he doesn’t seem to see any particular need to be standing up all the time.

The same is true off the ice, which is why there are holes in all his trousers.

I’m too adult to be so unbothered by holes and stains. Which is almost a little bit sad.

Most of current fashion is so far from my taste that I struggle to find clothes that I want to wear.

Take skirts, for example. I like A-line skirts that reach at least the top of my knees. Straight, narrow skirts I cannot walk in; short skirts I cannot sit in. I rather like being able to do both, freely and without worrying about my clothes.

I’m generally cold, so for winter wear I prefer wool.

And I want my clothes to look at least somewhat interesting. Not for the sake of whoever may see me in those clothes, but for my own sake. Plain flat cloth in a single colour (or even worse, a non-colour like black or navy or beige) is simply depressing. I want interesting fabrics, or panels of different fabrics, or drapes and folds, or lace or embroidery or appliques, or funky pockets. Anything!

There are probably places that sell these kinds of skirts, somewhere – but not the high street stores or the major online retailers. All the skirts in my winter wardrobe (with one exception) I bought before we moved back from England. That makes them over 10 years old, and some are definitely at the ends of their lives.

During this Christmas break I gathered my courage and sewed a skirt. Yay!

I have very little experience at sewing clothes. The actual stitching part is easy. The hard part is making it fit. I can sew sofa cushions and dress-up costumes or plush toys without much of an effort: I just put some pieces together and voilà, here’s a cushion! But a skirt needs to actually fit. Ready-made patterns usually don’t fit me well out of the box, so there would be measuring and adjusting the pattern and more measuring and then more of the same, and what if it ends up not fitting after all?

But I figured that I could manage a simple A-line skirt, especially if I chose a forgiving, slightly stretchy fabric. My new skirt is made of nice, warm, thick wool in a nice non-black colour. It has an asymmetrical hemline, and both lace AND a funky pocket! And it fits. (Phew!)

I hand-stitched the side seams, because the fabric was so thick that this was easier than trying to get three layers of it through the sewing machine. Once I’d done that, it felt wrong to machine sew the next part, so I just kept going by hand. It looks really nice this way – the seams are nearly invisible – but that’s a side benefit. I simply enjoyed the stitching.