The local shops have put up their Christmas-themed window decorations and trees in Spånga torg have acquired lights.

The very last and final birthday party for this season: Ingrid’s and Adrian’s combined celebration with the extended families (grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins). Almost like Christmas, in fact, with lots of people and lots of gifts, and slightly too much cake – but with Halloween-themed decorations instead of a tree.

While I was shopping for Christmas gifts for the family, I bought one for myself too: a macro lens. Today I took a few moments to try it out. Holy cow this lens is SHARP.

Speaking of shopping: there’s nothing like a deadline to focus the mind. Five hours of shopping and I was all done. Not the most enjoyable shopping experience (though those are rare in any case) but a very efficient one.

First we made lussebullar, saffron buns. We started off making those mainstream S-shaped buns (kuse) but quickly got bored with those and switched to making B-shaped buns (lussekatt), crossed S’s (julvagn) and other such traditional shapes. (The internets seem to have only one decent image of those shapes.) Then we got tired of those as well and branched out into more creative shapes: twists and braids and spirals of twists… and palm trees and swans and snails. And then we poked in lots of raisins in them all.

Later we baked gingerbread cookies. We have dozens of cookie cutters of all kinds of shapes, so the cookies ended up quite varied. Every year I start off making different kinds of cookies but then end up making mostly Christmas trees, hearts and pigs. They offer the best combination of efficient dough use (not much scrap dough left over between them), easy handling (unlike the reindeer and men with their long fiddly legs that break off), Christmas-themed imagery, and a good shape for later decorating.

Ingrid was making buns and cookies like a pro this year: rolling, kneading, shaping, decorating… Adrian liked playing with the bun dough and adding the raisins (and eating the raisins). Otherwise he wasn’t very interested.

Having just gone through the receipts in my wallet for December, I note that I have bought 23 lussekatter at Pressbyrån during this Christmas season, for a total of 338 kronor.

(The one in the photo below was made by Ingrid and not bought at Pressbyrån.)

We have an eclectic tree with everything from delicate hand-made glass ornaments and Chinese cloisonné eggs, to giant paper crafts projects from preschool.

Ingrid is busy overseeing the opening of Christmas gifts.

Adrian couldn’t care less about the gifts but loves the raisins and gingerbread cookies.

We had our company Christmas dinner yesterday, at Ballbreaker. Not a surprising choice of venue given that the other five employees are men between the ages of about 30 and 35. To be fair, they did ask if it would be OK with me and I said yes, but I have to admit I said it mostly so as to not be a party pooper.

The place turned out to be much nicer than I had expected. The pre-dinner activities (simulator racing, bowling and slot car racing) were great fun. I suck at car racing but didn’t do too badly at bowling.

Then we had our julbord (Swedish smorgasbord-style Christmas dinner) and the food also exceeded my expectations, really nice! Delicious herring and Nobel salmon.

After dinner we played shufflepuck for a couple of hours – first for fun and points only, then, as the rest of the company was getting increasingly sozzled, for stakes – developers vs. sales and management. By the time I left, the developer team had won one afternoon fika (sort of like afternoon tea) as well as one week of “coffee service” at the office (i.e. management to make and fetch coffee whenever a developer feels like having some). The third time we wagered 2 hours of manual testing per person (if devs win) against an on-site customer interview (if sales & management win) and this time we lost. At that point I went home but I understand that by the end of the night, various of my colleagues owed each other both lunches and rounds of beer and other things as well.

Shuffleboard. Image © Ballbreaker. The hands in the photo are not ours.

Blogging has been lighter than usual recently because I have been busy working on an advent calendar. I finished it in the nick of time, half an hour before midnight yesterday.

Advent calendars / Christmas calendars are very common in Sweden and there are all kinds. In stores you can buy cardboard calendars with a Christmas-themed picture behind each flap, or chocolate-filled ones. There are also advent calendars on TV as well as radio, basically Christmas-themed series with one episode aired every day from December 1st to 24th. There are also tie-in cardboard calendars for those, where the picture behind the day’s flap ties in with the current episode. On top of that, many families with kids have calendars with small gifts.

I was thinking of making an advent calendar already last year but with Adrian’s birth there was no time. I’d even browsed for inspiration and decided roughly on the kind of calendar to make: with pockets, in wool felt, with appliqued and/or embroidered Christmas motifs on each pocket – something like this one on Etsy, but with a starker, more pared-down look like this one on Purl Bee. This year I was determined to make one.

It took quite a bit longer than I’d planned because of unexpected complications. Firstly, I had planned to glue on most of the decorations, and did so with the first few decorations. Then I decided to be efficient do all the cutting and embroidering first, and save the glueing until the end. But when I went back to those first pockets, their decorations were falling off, even though I’d chosen a fabric glue that was supposed to work on wool felt! So instead of glueing I decided I’d stitch the pictures onto the pockets. Which actually turned out very good: the stitching gave each motif just a bit of depth, so it doesn’t look as flat as it would do with glueing.

But now there was so much stitching on each pocket (not only the appliques but the numbers as well) and especially with many long stitches on the back of each pocket, that I had to iron on interfacing to each pocket to protect the stitches. Otherwise they’d get damaged as soon as we put stuff in the pockets. That in turn meant that I had to edge the top of each pocket with blanket stitch, to make sure the interfacing doesn’t come loose from the felt of the pocket itself. More extra stitching!

Now, time to assemble the whole thing, and sew the pockets to the sheet of felt. I had vaguely imagined that I’d do this by machine, just like the Purl Bee calendar. But now that everything else was hand-stitched, machine sewing would look out of place and drag down the overall impression. Besides, when I took out the sheet of felt, I realized it was so thick and stiff that there was no way it would fit under my sewing machine. Yet more stitching!

All the steps up to this one had been fun and challenging in a good way. But this last bit was quite tedious and physically hard work – the background was 3mm dense wool felt and the pockets 1mm, so just pushing the needle through was difficult. And the pockets kept skewing and slipping, so I had to keep measuring and aligning them all the time. (Even so, they ended up a bit wonky here and there.) Halfway through my fingertips were really sore and I thought I’d get blisters. But I counted the days until the end of the month and decided to work a bit slower, leaving myself a narrower margin but sparing my fingers, so I ended up with slight calluses instead of blisters. Much better. Plus, about halfway through I also worked out a better method for aligning the pockets, so there was less fiddling with rulers and stuff, and the work progressed better.

I’m really pleased with the end result. So was Ingrid.

The materials I used were 3mm white wool felt from Handmade Presents, wool felt sheets in various colours from Myriad Online, and small bits of mixed fibre craft felt from my stash (for the faces of St. Lucia and Santa Claus – I was too stingy to order a full sheet when I only needed a few tiny pieces), and DMC 6-strand embroidery yarn.

I chose mostly secular imagery. Christmas for me is more of a midwinter celebration than a religious holiday. The actual designs I mostly drew with inspiration from Google Images… I’m not much of an artist so I went for a stylized, simple look. It’s mostly applique with a little bit of decorative stitching, but some pockets have embroidery only.

PS: Bonus points if you recognize the song on pocket #11!

Every afternoon I cycle through central Stockholm. Every afternoon Stockholm City’s Christmas lights programme makes me all tingly and happy.

I love the way they have gone “all in”, with beautiful LED lighting all along the major streets in the city centre. (Somewhere between 600,000 and 700,000 LED lights – the various sources differ on the exact number.)

I love the breadth and variety: glowing red orbs, sheets of light, trees draped in lights, even LED-covered reindeer shapes. It may not be high art but it is heart-warming.

I wish I had the equipment to take some proper pictures of it all. You can see some photos on Stockholmsjul’s Facebook page.