Ingrid’s actual birthday was a week ago, but that day was a party for the extended family and her and Adrian – rather than for her alone. To give her a celebration that was only for her, we had a family-only second birthday party for her today. With lemon merengue pie, of course!

It came out very lemony this time. Lemon is good, more lemon is better, but apparently there is a point where there is too much lemon in the pie.

I’ve embroidered all the pieces I was going to embroider, so today I started assembling the whole project by stitching the appliqué pieces to the skirt, both the embroidered wool and the patterned silk that was the starting point of the design.

The more I looked at the big picture, though, the more I started having second thoughts. Not about the embroidered appliqué pieces, that I had previously hesitated about. No, those actually go together well, in my opinion. It’s the silk pieces that I now don’t like. Compared to the rest, they look garish and loud.

I went on and started attaching the pieces, but the more I did, the less I liked it. I didn’t even get to the end of the seam around the first silk piece before I decided to kick them out of this project. I’ve got enough of the wool fabrics to make replacement pieces for the ones that were silk in my original design. It’s going to be better that way.

The Dasiphora really isn’t justifying its existence here, especially with its neighbours for contrast. Little to no growth since they were planted, easily squashed by winter snows, and no autumn colour. Bleh.

I’m hitting my flex bank limit at work, which I had planned to use for my usual autumn hike, but Nysse’s long convalescence made that impossible. Today was forecast to be sunny so I just took the day off and went for a walk. My initial plan was to continue hiking the Sörmlandsleden. However getting to the next stage would have required me to drive through all of Stockholm in the morning rush hour, and then another hour, and then do the same on my way back – which really did not appeal at all. So instead of going south, I went north, to Skokloster. Sweden’s largest private castle, now a museum, but unfortunately closed for the season. I can’t remember if I’ve ever been there, but if I have then it was decades ago and I’ve no memories of it.

The walk started right at by the castle and circled round to the back, providing some lovely views of it.

The forest south of the castle was a surprisingly wild one, all tangles and roots and fallen trees. Both these photos are taken straight along the path, which you can barely even see.

The path was well marked and followed the Upplandsleden trail for the most part. The orange signposts were familiar to me from Sörmlandsleden and were easy to spot.

When the trail curved inland away from the lake, there were some more open landscapes with beautiful autumn colours. This was another reason why I came here and didn’t walk somewhere closer to home: I really wanted some deciduous forest with pretty colours, instead of pine and spruce.

When the trail approached the castle again from the other side, there were signs of the grounds having a noble history. There were old water reservoirs for the castle’s fountains, now overgrown, and boulevards now leading to nowhere.

The land-facing side of the castle was impressive again. Though I found the remains of the park pretty underwhelming, like nearly all Swedish parks. This one barely deserved the name. A lawn, some gravel paths, and a few lines of trees, and that was it. All very large, very straight, and clearly meticulously tended, but so very basic.

The off-centre placement of that ornamental urn in front of the castle really bothered me. I guess only a photographer would pay attention to it.

I had my packed lunch on one of the benches in front of the castle. It felt a bit surreal, especially since there was nobody else around.

Around 15 km in total.

Nysse in his cardboard box cave under the sofa table.

The Great Annual Measuring.

Adrian is over 160 cm.

Ingrid is still growing and has passed me in height.

Apfelstrudel, strawberry macarons, brownies, and lemon poppyseed muffins, plus cheese and crackers for those who want something other than sugar and carbs. There were several last-minute drop-outs so we ended up fewer than planned, which I thought would lead to plenty of leftovers, but the cakes were good and the guests hungry, so there wasn’t that much left afterwards.

Lemon poppyseed muffins for the family get-together tomorrow.

We’ve got a whole bunch of relatives, especially on Eric’s side, so there will need to be more than one cake. Once we started talking about it, every one of us had (very different) ideas about what to make, so we all ended up baking something.

Adrian and Eric will make theirs tomorrow, but to avoid stressing about oven times and who gets to use the oven when, I made my muffins today already, and Ingrid also will bake her macarons tonight.

Exploring chain stitch and its variations at the Thursday embroidery club. It’s more versatile than I had known.