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.

We celebrated Adrian’s birthday today.

Well, it wasn’t that much of a celebration really… he does like to have people around him but an actual birthday party with the whole extended family would be too much for him. And perhaps for the family, too, considering that they’d be invited back here for a second party a month from now. So we saved the partying for Ingrid’s birthday and just had some cake today, and invited my mum.

Except that we ate the cake after Adrian went to bed (which he did early because he had slept badly both last night and today during the day). And my mum mostly played with and read for Ingrid rather than Adrian, since Ingrid appreciates her company a lot more.

So really Adrian just had an ordinary Sunday, and the rest of us shamelessly used his birthday as an excuse to have fun. But I don’t think he minded.

Tuesday: Emajõe beach.

Wednesday: debilitating humid heat again. We fled to my father in the countryside and I spent most of the day sitting and sweating and gasping for air. Celebrated my birthday; everyone except me ate cake. They tell me it was good. I ate a handful biscuits.

Among my presents were two lovely necklaces that are almost complete opposites of one another: one pendant in the shape of a 3D-printed tangled geometrical ball structure, and one necklace that Ingrid had made out of wooden beads. She made it some months ago for the fun of making it, and now decided to give it to me. It is not quite my usual style but it is certainly colourful and happy.

Today: Elistvere loomapark, a small zoo with animals native to Estonia.

Spending Easter weekend with my mum in Uppsala. Today, an outing to the Fjällnora recreation area, with a tipspromenad walk through the forest. Brilliant sunshine again, lovely warm spring day. Lots of pretty blue and purple hepatica and wood anemones. Ingrid, with her distaste of walking, cycled on the forest path, even down some steep slopes with pine roots and stones. A budding mountain biker?

We had an afternoon gathering today for our extended family in Sweden. (This means half a dozen Berghedens, their kids and significant others, and my mum, since my brother rarely attends such things.) This was sort of a delayed birthday party for Eric, but also a reverse birthday party for the guests since many of them have birthdays in March and April, and we haven’t seen them since. Once Eric had gone through the list, it turned out that only one guest did NOT have a birthday in spring, and for two significant others we weren’t quite sure, so we found small gifts for them as well. (Later we found out that both of the unknowns also had birthdays within a month from now.)

With preparations and cleaning up this really took up all our day. Eric baked bread and two cakes. We cleaned the clutter out of the living room and vacuumed the ground floor, and brought out the garden furniture. Once the guests were here we realized the weather had turned so warm that we could sit outside – yay! – so we moved the party to our small patio. The three kids chose to sit in the sofa in the dim living room and play various electronic games instead.

We also got our strongest guests to help us with moving Ingrid’s fort. It is HEAVY. Our garden is slowly coalescing into “rooms” that each have a function and a certain character – perhaps not so visibly yet but in my mind. The part where the fort used to sit is turning into a kitchen garden, with raised beds for our strawberries etc, and soon a clothes airer. We moved it closer to the swing and the deck-to-be, so that part of the garden will become a “room” for playing and lounging.

Yesterday, after the daily post, I discovered that my ExpressCard card reader has stopped working, probably as a result of upgrading to OSX Snow Leopard. Annoying: I had to use my old SD card reader, which glacially slow, to download photos from the camera. Sent a support request to Belkin; hopefully there is a fix.

Adrian spent a lot of time fussing and whining again. Going out for a walk with the pushchair seems to be the best cure.

We took down the last Christmas decorations. I baked a pie for dinner, with Ingrid helping me make the dough.

Ingrid then went on to make “soup” out of water and flour. And she seemed to like the taste of it, for real. Then she asked me what else she could add. Salt and ketchup were added, and then she thought some physalis would fit nicely.

When I was looking for party game ideas for Ingrid’s fourth birthday, one of the pages I stumbled upon said, roughly, that a kids’ birthday party is a success if the child feels special, and none of the guests break down crying. I.e. don’t make it too hard for yourself. That struck me as very sensible advice, and I’ve adopted it for Christmas, too. It helps me keep away from the mummy trap, the one that makes mums struggle to make a perfect holiday for their families (especially the children) while they themselves have no time or energy to enjoy themselves.

So I kept my Christmas preparations relaxed and included nothing elaborate, nothing that felt like too much work. No gingerbread house, for example, and not much in the way of Christmas decorations (apart from the tree). A very simple Advent calendar for Ingrid. Gifts that (hopefully) were appreciated but not stunning, perfect, best-ever, because that’s what I could manage.

The best part of this Christmas holiday for me was having my mum here. She and Ingrid like playing with each other. So with 3 adults for 2 kids (my brother was here too but he’s not the kind who plays with children) we could keep all the kids happily occupied and still have one pair of hands free for preparing meals etc. I’ve been enjoying myself cooking semi-fancy meals, (a) because I could concentrate and know that I won’t be interrupted in the middle of an important step, and (b) because someone would have time to enjoy eating them. Even two desserts!