The first of two embroidery workshop sessions took place today, and I started working on my starfish design. I’ve done embroidery before and I was familiar with all the stitches we went through, but still learned new things.

The most useful trick I learned today is to sew applique designs not with blanket stitch but with whip stitch, and then work stem stitch or backstitch around the edge. It’s faster, more stable, and looks more even. Whenever I sew blanket stitch along a curve – and most appliques tend to have curved shapes – the stitches always tend to slip, no matter how careful I am with the thread tension. I never have any problems with whip stitch. Plus stem stitch is thicker and stands out more than blanket stitch, so the whole applique becomes more distinct and gets more depth this way. I loved this.

I also got to try out some new materials. The materials kit contained pieces of felted wool cloth (vadmal) in various colours, wool thread and linen thread. I hadn’t worked with vadmal before, or with linen thread. I quite liked the look of shiny, sleek linen thread on matte wool fabric.

An embroidery workshop in Swedish is probably not relevant for you all, but in case you are interested, the workshop was held by Tamme Craft. The name “Tamme” is Estonian, which is what caught my eye to begin with. It turned out that the company is run by a lady with Estonian roots.

Please excuse the atrocious lighting in the photo. It’s so dark here that I have to turn on all available lamps for embroidery.

I bought myself an early Christmas gift in the form of an online wool embroidery workshop. I need some new impressions and a break from the never-ending sameness.

The workshop package included a bag of materials and also a suggested design. Traditional Swedish wool embroidery designs tend to have a lot of hearts and flowers which seems rather dull and “been there, done that” so I wanted something more interesting.

The larger traditional embroideries often include animals such as birds and horses. I don’t feel any particular affinity with birds or horses, so I went looking for some other cool animal, and decided to embroider starfishes. They’re like flowers, but cooler. Especially when you go beyond the most well-known species.

The first of the two workshop meetings is already tomorrow so I’m sitting up late, sketching starfishes.

All the socks I’ve planned to knit for Christmas are finished but there are still several weeks left until Christmas Eve so I thought I’d knit some more things. Both kids will get a pair of mobile mittens with finger openings. I found a nice easy pattern to follow in relatively chunky yarn – Keep in touch by Drops Design.

Ingrid isn’t supposed to get any Christmas gifts at all this year, because the gaming computer she got was expensive enough to be both a birthday gift and a Christmas gift and then some. But mittens are more like a utility so those don’t really count, I think.

Oh, let’s be honest. Every gift I knit is a selfish one. The knitting is as much a gift to myself as the finished object is to whoever gets it.

Nice easy patterns are quick to make but also kind of boring to knit, so I decided to add some cables to these mittens, inspired by another design I saw in a book. Then I had the idea of doing the cables in contrasting colours and when I pictured the result in my mind it looked so much better than what I saw in the original pattern that I just had to do it this way. I’ve never done intarsia cables before, but how hard can it be.

Not very hard, it turns out, but fiddly. So my quick pairs of mittens are now not so quick any more. Every other row there is cabling to do, and in the rows between the coloured stitches have to be knitted backwards because the yarn end is at the wrong side of the coloured band. It’s not quite double the work but almost. Maybe it would have been wiser to stick to a simpler design for a last minute project like this… but I do like these a lot. I have two weeks left still so it’ll be fine.

I can knit for Ingrid right here in plain sight without her noticing anything. She’s busy with her own thoughts. If you asked her, she would probably be able to tell you that I have been knitting, but not much more.

It’s much trickier with Adrian. He is curious and sociable. He looks at my knitting, comments on the design, opines on the colours, tries it on even when he knows it’s not for him. There is no way he would not notice. So I’ll have to make his late at night when he is in bed. Or perhaps during the day when he is at school, if I can find the time.

I went for a walk today instead of a more energetic workout. I feel slightly off-colour, sluggish and tired, and just didn’t have the energy for anything more.

It’s funny how corona-adjusted my brain has become. As soon as I see someone on the pavement ahead of me, I adjust my trajectory and step out onto the roadway to pass them at a safe distance, without even thinking about it. Unless they do it first. It has become so normal to stay away from people.

Sometimes I even do it at home, out of habit.

I read an article in a magazine recently about the history of advent stars, starting with the Moravian stars in Germany in the late 19th century and spreading into Sweden, among other places. The article quoted an ethnologist who commented on the current habit of hanging several such stars in one’s home and described it as a sign of wastefulness, wanting much of everything, and as an American ideal leaking in. As opposed to proper Swedish, Lutheran culture where thou shalt not have any fun, I guess.

Vårt välstånd gör oss mer slösaktiga, kanske vi kan säga. Just nu vill vi ha stjärnor och ljusstakar både inomhus, i trädgården och på balkongen. Det amerikanska idealet sipprar in. Vi befinner oss fortfarande i slöseriet och vill ha mycket av allt. Frågan är hur och om det kommer att förändras.

Perhaps the ethnologist lives in a lit-up inner city. Out here in the suburbs the evenings are dark. Heck, even the afternoons are dark, and sometimes there is not much light even in the middle of the day. (Stockholm has seen zero hours of sunlight thus far in December, which is not normal and not fun. This video (in Swedish) by SMHI will tell you more.) And we hang up advent stars and string lights and other kinds of Christmas lights to battle the darkness and bring some light into our lives. So that ethnologist can take her snobbish views and go get stuffed.

I’m cheating and using a picture I took yesterday, because there is little chance of getting a photo of Ingrid in daylight on a weekday.

She’s doing homework for their technology class – a technical drawing of a thing they constructed in class. The task was to build a structure to protect a raw egg that they then dropped from various heights. Now she’s doing the follow-up task of documenting their structure. The structure that Ingrid’s team built kept an egg intact when it was dropped from a window two floors up. (That’s third floor in the sensible parts of the world and second floor in Britain.)

Ingrid spends a lot of time drawing and handles ProCreate like a true pro, switching between layers faster than I can follow.

This is what happens to gingerbread cookies in a household full of people who like order. They get sorted by shape, and stacked. Small hearts, large hearts, left-facing pigs, right-facing pigs, and numerous piles of small stars and circles made from the scraps of dough between the larger cookies.

This looked satisfying but later turned out to be not a very good idea. At least not when the cookies are stacked when they are still warm. Because this way the steam can’t evaporate and the cookies end up soft rather than crisp. Unfortunately we only discovered this when we had finished decorating. I put the undecorated ones back in the oven to dry them out, but you can’t heat the decorated ones because the icing goes all runny. So we will be eating soft gingerbread cookies this year.

Ingrid is a skilled decorator and makes the most fancy ones, like the Christmas trees here. Adrian likes lots of icing on his, and preferably in colour, not in white.

I like understated decorations, mostly in white.

One Christmas we got a truck-shaped cookie cutter from Mathem (the online grocery store). I guess we are valued customers or something. It’s one of Adrian’s favourites, and Ingrid made an actual Mathem truck cookie for him.

This is Adrian’s photo of the cookies he liked best: a Santa couple, a very Grinchy Grinch, and a donut with extra everything.

We made gingerbread cookies. Ingrid joined us for a while but not long enough for me to catch her in photos.

The dough was softer and stickier than usual so we had trouble getting the cookies off the table and onto the baking sheets. And the first batch got slightly burned. But once we had kneaded in more flour into the dough and adjusted the oven, the rest came out delicious.

I prefer the traditional shapes – the hearts, Christmas trees, and stars. They’re mostly convex, easy to handle, and are well suited for decorating.

It’s December and Advent of Code is on again. I begin my days by sitting in the sofa, feet up, solving the day’s puzzles. One advent calendar in the computer, another in the background…

In the past I’ve used AoC to experiment with new languages like Python and F#. Now I have enough to do at work so I keep it simple and stick to C# which is the language I am most productive in.

There’s a competition element to it, but I ignore that. Not getting up at six in the morning; not rushing through the puzzles. I’m just happy to take part.

There was a full-on crisis at work today, which I spent all day resolving. Once the crisis was over my brain was mush and I felt too dull to do anything. I’m borrowing this photo from an earlier day, and posting this two days later.

This is the second oven mitt I’ve patched in exactly the same spot: the tip of the thumb. I’m pretty sure that the wear here is due to the thumb getting into food. Maybe someone lifts a heavy, full baking pan with lasagna out of the oven and the thumb of the mitt gets a bit of sauce on it. That spot of food goes unnoticed and unwashed, and somehow it weakens the fabric. As we keep using the mitt the fabric in that spot gets exposed to heat and a hole is burned in the dirty spot. But only there, and not in the parts that are most exposed to heat. There’s some chemistry behind this, I’m sure.