It’s summer and the weather is lovely, and do I use this opportunity to do things in the garden? No, I’m on a crafting spree and the garden is borderline neglected. Some other day.

Next up on the list of “someday” projects: semi-fancy cloth napkins. Every Christmas and New Year’s and other festive opportunity when I cook semi-fancy food and we bring out the linen tablecloths, we have napkin problems.

Store-bought linen napkins are nice but feel a tad too stiff – formal rather than festive. They’re often too large, more for show than for use. I find them intimidating.

Plain paper napkins are the opposite – too plain.

Printed paper napkins, which at first glance look like the perfect compromise, suck in reality. They can look good but most are unusable: the surface is so slick that when you try to actually wipe your mouth (or fingers, if the semi-fancy meal includes finger food) then they don’t absorb anything.

Today I bought two old linen tablecloths from a second-hand store (Stadsmissionen in Bromma). I’m going to cut them into squares and turn them into napkins. They’ll be homey and invitingly soft and conveniently small.

In fact now that I look more closely at one of the tablecloths I bought, I see it’s made of two large napkins with a strip of lace in between. Looks like they’re mismatched – I didn’t see that until I took this photo. And they’re huge! Each one will be turned into four napkins of more sensible size.

This will be the third incarnation for these napkins – from napkin to tablecloth and then to napkin again (but smaller). What shall I call this, then? Re-upcycling? Up-and-down-cycling?

1. Sewed the buttons onto my cardigan. The buttonholes are tiny (even though I did follow the pattern instructions to the dot) so I had to make really small buttons, and still they’re quite fiddly to get through the holes. Either the buttonholes will stretch a bit with time, or I might end up not using them much.

I’m glad the cardigan is done and I can start using it when autumn comes.

2. Painted the second coat on the garden sofa. Looking good!

It looks like some spots (not in the photo) may need a third coat. The old dark blue colour is shining through a bit, because my first coat of paint didn’t adhere well. I guess I wasn’t aggressive enough with the sandpaper.

3. Sewed a needle book for rarely used and reserve needles. We have a pin cushion for the three or four needles we use most often for ordinary sewing, but all the others have been in their factory packaging (which is not made for long term storage and tends to fall apart with time) or stuck into loose pieces of paper or fabric. Now they’re all tidily stored: small needles, large needles, blunt-tipped embroidery needles of various sizes, and cutting point leather needles.

To be honest, tidying up the needles was just an excuse. It’s not been a high priority on my list. It really was just a way to find something small and useful to do with embroidery. I like small projects – a larger project can turn from fun into a must, but a small one that I can finish in one sitting is pure fun.

Wool felt is such a wonderful crafts material! It feels nice to the touch, it’s durable and dirt-resistant, and it is so easy to work with because it doesn’t fray. I bought a bunch of felt pieces for my advent calendar in 2011 and I still have some scraps left of that stash in odd colours. That’s actually why this needle book ended up being in green as well – I only had large enough pieces of felt in a few colours, and only the greens harmonized with each other. I was getting a bit fed up with all the green today so I compensated with extra colourful decorations not in green.

The embroidery is all chain stitch and detached chain stitch. I’m pretty pleased with how tidy I managed to keep the rear side of the front cover. I could have gone all fancy and added a lining to hide it but (a) I don’t want the added bulk, and (b) I like the raw edges.

Adrian and I cycled to Vinsta to buy paint for the garden sofa. For the sake of simplicity I reused the same green color that we already have elsewhere in the house. (S5030-G30Y in the NCS colour system that all the paint shops in Sweden use.)

Then we started painting. That thing has an awful lot of fiddly little pieces that take forever to paint! Still, I got the first coat of paint finished before the night.

We went out geocaching/walking/picnicking. I tried to think of someplace new, and came up with Erstavik. I passed through there on my bike some years ago and walked there once on my own and really liked what I saw.


We started off with a geocache just a few hundred metres from the parking lot, and then headed towards the next nearest one, which sounded intriguing. (Floating islands!) Adrian took care of most of the navigation, with some expert help from Ingrid.

The cache description said lake Dammsjön has three floating islands. We only spotted one, and another clump of earth that could maybe have been one. It looked like a perfectly ordinary small island, with some shrubs and a few pines, and didn’t seem to be floating anywhere.

After getting the second cache, we had our picnic on a small rocky peninsula extending into the lake. (Cold falafel in flatbread, with a chutney and sour cream sauce.) It was a lovely spot and I’m glad nobody else had gotten there before us! There’s something about being surrounded by water that makes it feel like you’re really on your own.

There were flat shelves of rock leading from the peninsula into the water that really invited to bathing. The lake water felt quite warm, so we took a quick dip.

I decided to swim to that island to see whether it really floated. It did indeed! The edge of it had no support, just water below it, and it wobbled up and down when I pushed it. I didn’t try to get onto the island – it seemed like it would be tricky – but I’m curious what it would feel like to walk on it.

Afterwards I read that the islands float around so much that they sometimes reattach themselves to the shore and then depending on the weather maybe float free again. So perhaps that’s what the other islands have done this year as well. Or maybe they just floated into some corner of the lake where we couldn’t see them.


There were masses and masses of blueberries everywhere. The first ones we looked at weren’t quite ripe yet, but when we got to sunnier spots, it turned out that most of them were just ripe enough. They’ll probably be sweeter in a week or so, but we’re here now.

As we were heading back towards the car, we saw signs next to the path about a café at the beach of Erstavik. Ice cream sounded good, so we turned that way instead. After much walking, we found the café to be closed. But the beach wasn’t, so Ingrid and Adrian had another swim. Especially Adrian didn’t like the lake – it had steep, rocky sides, and he prefers smooth beaches where he can reach the bottom.

Some years there are lots of killer slugs in the garden. 2014 was the first year I noticed them in large amounts. 2015 was also a slug year. In the summers since then, we haven’t had very many.

This year is apparently a slug year again. The bounty is on, and Ingrid is hunting them.

We’ve given up on trying to collect and freeze them. Too much hassle – they tried to crawl out of the freezer bag all the time. Now we simply cut them in half and throw them somewhere where we won’t step on them. I have a special pair of slug scissors in my garden basket.

We also saw unusually many leopard slugs today. I’ve never seen more than two or three on the same day. Today I think we saw almost ten. Maybe they’re here to eat the Spanish slugs!

Today I built a storage thing for our garden tools – rakes, spades, apple pickers etc. The tools are now contained and supported, and grabbing one no longer makes the others fall down. A “someday” project I can cross off my list now!

It’s functional and solid, but a closer look shows it’s a clumsy thing. I forgot to take the offset of the vertical pieces into account when measuring and cutting the top pieces, so the top pieces are 1 cm too short at each end.

And all the other pieces (that are the right length!) went wonky when I screwed them together. I think it’s because the holes I drilled were not exactly at 90° so each piece was pulled slightly askew. We have no proper workbench and definitely no drill press.

For this project it doesn’t really matter much. This thing will stand in the basement where I won’t see it very much. It solves the problem I want it to solve, and it is solid and stable.

But I’ll be making a drill jig when I next want to build something.

My brother spent the day with us. We don’t visit each other often – he doesn’t travel much and doesn’t like entertaining people at his home, so I usually see him at the usual holidays. We missed him at Easter and Midsummer, so I drove him from Uppsala to Spånga and back so we could simply talk.

I found out that he is distancing himself from our mother because the difference between their political opinions is becoming unbridgeable. (And, knowing them, neither of them can probably refrain from arguing about it.) They live a ten-minute walk from each other and I’m pretty sure that both are quite lonely, especially in these quarantine times, and yet they’d rather be alone than talk to each other.

The rainbow has nothing to do with any of that and is not symbolic in any way. It’s here only because rainbows are pretty, and the contrast between the dark band between the two rainbows and the light area below them is cool.

One of the highlights of our Estonia trip is always the adventure park at Otepää. The coronavirus situation means that we get no trip to our friends and family in Estonia, so no visit to Otepää either.

I found two adventure parks similar to Otepää near Stockholm, and today we tried out the first of them – Accropark at Lida.

Eric unfortunately still had a sore back from our Gotland trip – too much sitting in the car and too many nights in on the wrong mattresses – so he couldn’t join us up in the trees.

I couldn’t help comparing Accropark to the park at Otepää.

Much of it was very similar. There are obstacle courses/climbing trails up in the pine trees that you follow from platform to platform, while a carabiner hooked onto a cable keeps you safe at all times. The obstacles can be anything – plank walkways, nets, wobbly assemblies of logs and cable, etc. There are courses of various difficulties, ranging from “good for kids” to “requires real physical exertion”.

At Otepää, a ticket allows you to climb each trail once. Accropark tickets are timed and you can climb as much as you want during your two-hour slot. This is nice in theory, because you can skip the basic courses and do your favourite harder courses several times. But they sell too many tickets to each slot. There was a lot of waiting in queues at each course start and at the platforms.

The park at Lida was crammed into a much smaller area. The courses criss-crossed each other and the ground area felt nearly cramped. I found it a bit difficult to navigate. It was fine as long as we strictly followed the difficulty order, because the start of the next course was always close to the end of the previous one. But finding the start of, say, the “Blue+” course among all the stuff was not very easy.

The courses themselves also felt smaller, although I’m not sure how much that was actually the case and how much was my subjective experience due to the denser arrangement. I think the courses probably had roughly the same number of obstacles, but many individual sections/obstacles were shorter than I had become used to. This plus all the queueing meant that I got less climbing and more waiting than I had expected.

Accropark had a really clever security solution on their courses. The harnesses at Otepää have two carabiners that you move from cable to cable, one at a time, so you’re always attached by at least one. The harnesses at Accropark have one normal carabiner that you move yourself, and one red that is permanently attached to the cable that you simply cannot remove. Getting it from one cable section to the next one took a bit of practice, but was quite convenient once I got the hang of it. Adrian and Ingrid are experienced climbers by now and wouldn’t forget to clip on, but when they were beginners, this solution would have removed one big worry for me.

There was one real disappointment for me at Accropark, and that was the zipline rides. They were just plain uncomfortable. The harness I got had me hanging so high up that the zipline cable was level with my eyes. I was constantly thinking about how to keep my head away from the cable (and failed once when I got spun around and the cable chafed the back of my head). I don’t know if the harness was badly designed or if I got the wrong size or something.

Several of the short rides between platforms also ended with really hard stops with a strong yank to the harness and nothing to soften the braking. Actually painful. The long zipline rides across the valley at Otepää are the best part of the park; here I didn’t even try the pure zipline courses because my experience on the short ones sucked so badly.

Ingrid and Adrian were both happy with the park and would be glad to go there again. Ingrid managed all the courses including the hardest “Red+” (although that one was a real challenge for her). Adrian did everything except that Red+.

I think we’ll try the other park at Vaxholm next time.

Bonus memory from Lida: the countless cute rabbits nibbling on the grass everywhere, including babies looking no bigger than my hand.

I crocheted a bunch of little bitty buttons for the cardigan. (Which is blocked and otherwise ready to be worn!)

Why not buy buttons? Mostly because I think using yarn buttons will make the buttonholes last longer. My brown cardigan is otherwise in great shape but most of its buttonholes are badly frayed. (Which reminds me to write a blog post about mending those. It’s been fiddly, and I’d be glad to avoid that work on this cardigan.) I also have a much older red cardigan with Chinese-style toggles in the same material as the cardigan itself, and those are not frayed at all. My hypothesis is that it’s the hard plastic buttons that are causing the fraying, not the general fact that the buttons/closures are being used.

A mama deer with its kid passed through the garden again this evening. They nibbled at various things (cherry branches, the round thujas, hydrangea flowers). Interestingly they ignored the clover patch.

The kid has lost its spots by now and simply looks like a smaller version of the adult one, though it lifts its back “feet” extra high when walking through grass.

I wonder if this is the same mama deer who was here with its two kids earlier, and she’s lost one. Or maybe it’s a different pair; there’s probably more than one deer family roaming around Spånga.