Everything has been mildly to moderately overwhelming for weeks and weeks. Drama at tretton37. Deciding to divorce. Deciding to leave tretton37. Job search. Divorce admin. House valuation. More divorce admin. Embroidery course. Party prep. Plus all of everyday life that still needs to happen – work, grocery shopping, cooking dinners, helping with homework.

I was doing my embroidery homework just before midnight, because that’s when I finally had some time for myself. Hand-stitching is a nice way to unwind.

I think I may have turned the corner now, though. The divorce settlement agreement has been signed, and I have also signed with a new employer, so at least I can put those projects behind me. Of the big things, I’ve just got the mortgage application process left. And the embroidery course, very enjoyable but also rather time-consuming, is more than halfway done.

The party preparations started several days ago, with three cakes baked over three days. We had an apple-pie cheesecake (Ingrid), a banana and chocolate cake (Adrian) and an almond cherry pie (Eric).

Today Ingrid decorated the house with golden balloons and serpentines.

Then there were guests – grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins – and presents.

The cakes and cheeses and snacks were eaten with much joy and appreciation.

There had been some concern that three cakes might be excessive, but it really wasn’t.

With no one to take pictures of me, here are two quick selfies to prove that I was also there.

Afterwards, we were tired.

Prepping for tomorrow’s celebration with our extended families of Ingrid’s and Adrian’s birthdays.

The children can barely be called children any more, and the guests are getting older. Cake is still an important part of a birthday party, but there’s more and more interest for less sugary snacks. Hence, a cheese platter or two. I’m splurging and buying the cheeses at an actual cheesemonger’s in Hötorgshallen, rather than just supermarket cheese.

A tribute concert to Georg Riedel, a Czech-born Swedish jazz musician and composer, who died earlier this year. A mixed bag. What I’m taking with me is that I like the singing of Sarah Riedel and Channa Riedel.

Ingrid has grown barely a few millimetres since last year. Got past me; job done. She didn’t even grow enough to make room to draw a new line for her this year.

Struggling with a design for the next “black, white and a colour” exercise. For the first time, this doesn’t feel like effortless play. I don’t have designs just flowing out of my brain, through my fingers, straight to the paper.

“Make a design with five squares/rectangles (four-cornered shapes), four circles, and three triangles.”

They don’t fit! Especially the triangles. I could easily and effortlessly throw out sketch after sketch consisting of rectangles and circles. But then trying to find a place for the triangles… just didn’t work.

I could pair up rectangles with circles, both of them full and convex.
I could pair up rectangles with triangles, with angles everywhere.
I could pair up circles with triangles, playing with the contrast between sharp angles and round shapes.

But with all three in the same design, it felt like they were working against each other.

In the end I blew up the triangles and hid them in the background. Still not entirely satisfied, but I can continue tweaking things when I interpret this with fabric and yarn.

Adrian usually joins me in my corner of the sofa when it’s time for him to do homework. If his homework is reading, we read side by side. If he’s doing something more active, like practising his French vocabulary, that tends to collide with my reading, and I knit instead. Today his homework was knitting, so we actually knitted together.

Ran into a giant hunk of concrete or something like it in my digging around the elderberry bush. I ran into it from three different angles and thought it was three separate rocks but then it turned out to be one giant one. I can wiggle it a bit, but it is too heavy for a human to lift, and too heavy and awkward to even lever or roll it out of where it is. So I’m going to end up burying it again. Damn it.

People who bury construction waste in a garden deserve to rot in a special kind of gardening hell. May they get mould in their lawns and may deer eat all their bushes.

“Black, white and a colour” embroidery course, exercise #3. To get our creative juices flowing, we painted on newsprint with Indian ink, painted on fabric to recapture the feeling of newsprint, and then finally used paper in our embroidery.

The design:

The painted fabric:

Putting it all together:

And just like for the past two exercises, I wouldn’t mind making another variation of this design but with different stitches and materials, and I have several more designs that I would also like to stitch, and actually I wouldn’t mind doing the whole exercise all over again.

The teacher’s design exercises really suits me perfectly. There’s just enough guidance and constraints to push me in directions I’d never have gone before, and still enough freedom to make the design my own. I get more ideas than I know what to do with, and I’m loving the outcomes. And the teacher’s feedback and our group discussions give rise to even more ideas.

Someone, probably deer, have already been chewing on the baby plum tree I planted this summer. It’s not even winter so they’re not doing it out of hunger. I guess plum tree bark just tastes good. This happened to the last tree as well, and I’m not letting it go any further. The tree is getting caged in. (Using material from the cage that housed Nysse a year ago.)