The embroidery club is planning for an exhibition, and we were encouraged to make name signs as part of preparing for it.

Sweden (and maybe some of the other Nordic countries) has a concept of studieförbund which are a kind of national umbrella organizations for study circles and educational groups. There are eight of them according to Wikipedia. Many were established over a century ago as a means to educate those who didn’t have access to higher education. These days they organize classes and workshops mostly in the domains of arts, crafts, humanities and social sciences.

In addition to “top-down” courses they also provide support for self-organizing study groups such as our embroidery club. We get access to rooms, including a kitchen and toilets, for no charge. We are also invited to participate in the parent organization’s events, and the exhibition is one of them. Within the framework of Stockholm Culture Night, Sensus Studieförbund will hold workshops, exhibitions and other activities. We and two other similar embroidery clubs were invited to arrange a small one-room exhibition and a workshop on the theme of “free embroidery” – to inspire more people to start embroidering.

The name signs aren’t going to be the focus of the exhibition (that will just be whatever past works everyone decides to bring) but just a fun way to make it more personal for the visitors.

I unravelled the bottom half of the first sleeve and re-did it with decreases. Now I’m on the second sleeve, and I made good progress during today’s knitting club session. Plus I’ve found a good method to pack it in a project bag so that I can work on it without taking it – and its five balls of yarn – out of the bag at all, so I can bring it with me to work etc.

I’m enjoying knitting this, but I’m still not sure if I’ll actually like wearing it. Maybe? Hopefully?

One of the two potted cyclamens is thriving like never before. The other is looking less lively every week. They get the same amount of light (obviously) and water and plant food. The only difference apart from the species/variety/whatever is that the one on the right occasionally gets sprayed with a diluted soap and alcohol solution because of pesky little flies. Now I’m wondering if perhaps the spraying is what’s making it grow so lush. If I start spraying the other one, even though it has no visible fly problem, will it also perk up?

The plastic cover on the driver’s side mirror on my car fell off at some point. It’s done that before, and then Eric found a replacement – for a juicy 900 SEK. Now that replacement has fallen off again and gotten lost, without me even noticing it happening.

When I had the car serviced, the mechanic wasn’t too worried about the mirror being all open to the elements, but it seems like a good idea to keep water and ice (and gravel and dust and whatnot) out of it as much as possible.

This weekend I DIY’d my own side mirror cover out of a plastic folder that I cut to shape and fit into the grooves of the mirror, and then fastened and covered with duct tape. Not entirely watertight, of course, but it seems solid.

Do I feel silly driving around with a duct-taped mirror? Yes. Is it worth 900 SEK for me to have a car that looks whole? Nope.

Ingrid is off to Boden, in the far north of Sweden, for fifteen months of military service.

Her position will be gruppchef stridsfordon and I have no idea what the correct English translation is, but it means that she will be leading a small group of soldiers in IFVs, infantry fighting vehicles. The first three months are “just” basic training; the group leader thing will come after.

She’s been looking forward to this for a long time, and working out to be in the best shape she can, but the nerves have been gaining the upper hand in the last week. Now it’s finally happening – a night train to Boden, and tomorrow morning she’ll be presenting herself at the garrison in Boden.

We probably won’t be hearing much from her in the near future, but she will be coming home for a few days already the weekend after next.

I’m having a baking weekend. The freezer was empty, the cake tin was empty – this could not continue.

The plan was to make brownies, oat cakes, and poppy seed buns. Adrian got there first with the brownie, though, so I just had the cakes and buns left for this weekend.

These Estonian oat cakes are based on a childhood recipe. They’re mostly rolled oats and butter, with just enough egg to hold them together, and a bit of sugar. Most people who eat them say they’re less sweet than expected, and that just means you can eat more of them. And chopped candied orange peel.

The traditional recipe I’ve held on to for many years doesn’t work in its original state any more. Standard-sized eggs have become so much larger that if I follow the old recipe, the cakes spread out when baked. They’re supposed to stay in little mounds, softening only just a tiny bit around the edges. I have no memory of how large eggs used to be in Estonia thirty-five years ago, but it seems that they must have been about 2/3 of today’s Swedish eggs. Right now with the eggs I get at the supermarket, using two eggs instead of three makes the cakes turn out exactly right.

The poppy seed buns came out great as well.

About a week after the snow disappeared.

Another brilliantly sunny day, another brief post-lunch walk near the office. The ice in Liljeholmen is still looking very thick and solid, but can it really be? It makes me want to throw rocks at it, or climb down and poke hard at it.

Ingrid and I went to see The Subterranean Sky – surrealist art from the collections of Moderna Museet.

We were confused and disappointed. Most of the works exhibited were not actually examples of surrealism, or at least not what we thought surrealism to be. Maybe we’re not educated enough.

There were some works of obvious, well-known surrealists such as Dali and Magritte, and Bunuel. And a rather bizarre umbrella clad in sponges. I have to wonder if the sponges looked so dead and brown and close to disintegrating into dust when the work was first made.

But then a whole lot of what I would have called abstractionism and dadaism: drawings generated automatically by the artist’s hands as they were shaken during a train ride; lines depicting nothing. One of Alexander Calder’s mobiles. Why were they there? No idea.

Robert Rauschenbergs “Mud muse” was, in my opinion, also not surrealism, but it was at least kind of fascinating. A pool of liquid mud that bubbled and erupted at seemingly random moments. The eruptions were energetic enough that the pool was surrounded by a splash zone with small dried spots of mud. It turned out to be not random but triggered by sound. I was hoping that meant sound detectors, but no, it was controlled by a recording that was, disappointingly, not even made audible.

So… yeah. Not very impressed.

I set a bread dough on Sunday morning. It took a long time to rise, as usual in our house. I was going to bake it in the evening, after dinner, but completely forgot about it. Then at 10 o’clock at night I was suddenly reminded of it – way too late to shape loaves and bake them.

I put it in the fridge (having reshuffled half the fridge to make room for the large dough bowl) and crossed my fingers that it would keep for a day. Either it works or it doesn’t – worth a try at least. Came home from the office on Monday evening, took it out, and picked up from where I’d left off.

The dough didn’t suffer at all from a twenty-hour pause. The bread came out great – possibly even better than usual.