Guess who hasn’t finished the knitted Christmas presents yet…

I finally finished the napkin project I started in July! One batch I embroidered already back then. The other batch I intended to decorate with prints. I ordered a nice stamp from Etsy. And then I waited. I think it took over two months for it to arrive by snail mail from somewhere Russia. In September I was busy with other things so I put the stamp away and then more or less forgot about it until now.

Now I realized that it’s time to finish the work if I want them for Christmas and New Year’s dinners. So I finally did the stamping, and then spent the rest of the evening ironing the napkins to fix the paint.

The instructions for the textile paint said to iron the fabric for 5 minutes with the iron set to “cotton”, so that’s what I did. But afterwards the fabric was yellowish where I had ironed it. (You can’t see it here because I took the photo before ironing.)

I can’t use any bleaching agents on these and the textile paint can only be washed in 40°C so I really hope the yellow goes away with just a gentle wash… Otherwise I guess we’ll call it a halo or something. A feature, not a bug.

We have mixed feelings about gingerbread houses. They are fun to make and decorate, but afterwards nobody really wants to eat them. They get dusty and stale. And the store-bought gingerbread doesn’t taste very good to begin with.

Well, we can just see this as a crafts project where the materials happen to be nearly edible. You wouldn’t eat paper crafts even though you technically can, right?

We have a tree. The house immediately feels more festive.

We haven’t had a clear sky for weeks on end now, but today there was some! https://www.reddit.com/r/sweden/ was filled with jokes about “what is this mysterious blazing orb I am seeing in the sky”.

I wrote back in February about my Raspberry Pi and the plans to use it for a music rating and recommendation app.

Well, I actually wrote the app, and it has been running “in production” since before the summer. I’m really pleased with it – I achieved exactly what I had hoped. It often helps me rediscover music that I had forgotten we had, and listen to old favourites that I would probably have not remembered otherwise. And because it logs all the music we listen to, including music that Eric puts on, I also discover entirely new music.

The app shows me what is currently playing on our various Sonos devices so that I can rate these albums. I can also rate recently played ones. And based on those ratings I can ask for recommendations. I get a list of suggestions with albums I have rated highly, and another list of albums I have not rated yet (to gather more data).

I’ve been thinking of adding more smarts to it. It could suggest albums that we haven’t listened to recently (forgotten favourites, rather than all favourites). And maybe show some “flashbacks” like the blog has – “your most listened album last year” etc. Maybe a project for the Christmas break.

From a technical point of view, I learned more Vue.js than I knew before, and played around with flex layout in CSS. My CSS is mostly hacks piled on other hacks, but in a tiny project like this that’s fine!

I sit too much. The daily exercise is enough to keep actual back problems away, but if I spend too much time in the sofa in the evening, I start feeling it in my lower back.

I’ve discovered an alternative way of reading in the sofa. I sit on the floor, prop up the Kindle against the back of the sofa or an armrest, and then lean on the seat. The carpeted floor is firm without being hard, and with the support of the sofa I can still relax.

Starfishes, more or less as I had envisaged them.

The second session of the embroidery workshop will be tomorrow and will deal with finishing and making something of your embroidery. I’ve been working on mine so that I can be done with the actual embroidering by then.

Since this was supposed to be a learning opportunity, I tried to use not just familiar stitches (running stitch, whip stitch and chain stitch) but also some that I rarely use (stem stitch) and some that I have seen but never tried myself (couching and French knots).

Couching was as easy as it looked. That’s what I used for the thin white starfish with small red stitches at the top left. French knots are the small wart-like things on the green starfish. Not difficult per se, but I need more practice to get them really even and tight.

When I had finished the starfishes, I thought the design as a whole was still lacking something. I had four separate starfishes rather than one coherent design. I thought of adding seaweeds, but decided on small seed pearls. They’re like water bubbles sparkling in the sun.

The stem stitch framing around the edges of the starfishes came out really nice, crisp and distinct. This is my new favourite technique and I don’t think I will be using blanket stitch for appliques much from now on.

One of my embroidery books encouraged readers to sign their embroideries. It’s a tradition in older works to put the maker’s initials and the year somewhere. I saw this advice when I had already filled the background with pearls and had no suitable place for signing. But the piece of cloth that will become the back of the bag/pouch thing (which I intend to make of this) is all empty, so I decided to sign the back instead.

It’s funny to imagine someone finding this many decades from now. Maybe I’ll give it away and the recipient tires of it and gives it to charity. Maybe I die and someone inherits it and then gifts it to someone else. And then at some point someone discovers it and starts digging into its history and writes a school project about it. Or a blog post, or whatever takes the place of blog posts a hundred years from now. “The materials are of Swedish manufacture and the design is clearly inspired by Swedish traditions, but the embroidery is signed with an Estonian name, very intriguing!”

I finished a jigsaw puzzle. Most puzzles are just pretty pictures, but this one was interesting.

The puzzle is based on a celestial map by Frederik de Wit from 1640. My photo is just a detail and full of noise from the puzzle piece contours, but you can find a high-resolution, zoomable version of the map at the page I’ve linked to, or a version with brighter colours here.

At first glance it looks just like a pretty map of the sky and all the constellations. But as I was doing the puzzle, I inevitably became familiar with all its details and realized it’s more like a science poster, illustrating the latest knowledge about astronomy at that time. Around the main map there are smaller insets explaining astronomical concepts and phenomenons such as the tides, the phases of the moon, and how the Earth’s rotation causes the cycle of day and night. Other insets illustrate the Ptolemaic, Tychonian and Copernican astronomical systems.

The artist had obviously seen horses and women and peacocks and lions, or perhaps reasonably realistic pictures of them. His bears are reasonably bear-like, although with rather long tails. His dolphin on the other hand looks to be based on hearsay and imagination. I wonder how far removed the artist would have been from a first-hand sighting of a dolphin.

The constellation Cetus/Balena (“The Whale”) in my photo looks even more monstrous. At first I assumed this might be due to lack of knowledge, but I have now learned that the Ancient Greek name kētŏs for this constellation originally meant “sea monster”. Now that our understanding of the world does not contain mysterious sea monsters any more, cetus has come to mean “whale” instead.

I noted with some curiosity that all fishes, dolphins, sea monsters, snakes, hydras and dragons are depicted in green.

I also realized that the Estonian word for “peacock” (paabulind), which sounds so Estonian, clearly has its roots in the Latin name Pavo.

Everything is still gray and dripping.

I am so fed up with this. When we next get a day with actual daylight, I will drop everything (short of Christmas Eve), cancel all meetings and go out for a hike somewhere.