Slow progress on the Stockholm embroidery.

It’s big and bulky enough now to be slightly difficult to transport. Folding it up doesn’t work so well any more, because of the stiff nature of the embroidered sections. I’ve taken to folding it in three lengthways, leaving the embroidered part flat, and then rolling it up.

Our lovely Bernina sewing machine was inherited from Eric’s mother, and will soon be leaving with Eric.

Every household needs a sewing machine, and I’d find it difficult to manage without one. Today I found a new sewing machine. Or rather, an old one. Here’s my new old Husqvarna Automatic 21 A. Shiny and green!

According to one site, this particular model was produced from 1958 to 1961, so it is probably even older than the Bernina. For back-stitching, you press and hold a button on this one, whereas on the Bernina you push the stitch length lever to the opposite side, so you can use both hands while back-stitching. But the Husqvarna is a fancier model, featuring a whole bunch of decorative stitches.

I’m quite unlikely to use the decorative stitches much. All I want from my sewing machine in terms of features is straight stitches forwards and backwards, and zig-zag. Possibly, maybe, buttonholes.

What I really want is reliability and repairability. I want a stable, solid metal body, and an absolute minimum of plastic components. With care and regular maintenance, this one should keep going for decades yet.

Also it doesn’t hurt that this cost me only 800 SEK.

A scary one and a cheerful one.

We had thirty-eight trick-or-treaters this year. Thirty-eight! And I thought we were well prepared, with Ingrid having bought enough candy for about twenty kids, based on last year’s outcome. Halfway through she went out and bought more. And still there were more kids coming, sometimes in groups of eight and even ten. In the end I was handing out vanilla-flavoured wafers of some sort that I dug out from the bottom of a cupboard. There is just no predicting this.

The last two embroidery exercises for the “black, white and a colour” course.

First: “Make a design with five squares/rectangles (four-cornered shapes), four circles, and three triangles.” I struggled but in the end made something that I rather liked. The deadline for that exercise was during a very busy week for me, so I fell back on appliqué as a quick way to make shapes.

Apparently it wasn’t just me – appliqué seems to have been the instinctive choice for this exercise for all of us in the group. Hence the follow-up exercise for all of us: realize the same design but without using appliqué at all, only stitches.

This weekend wasn’t less busy. I sat with this embroidery during the Thursday embroidery club session, which I’ve normally set aside for the Stockholm embroidery, and I still ended up working until almost midnight yesterday.

I couched the black quadrilaterals with super-thick wool yarn. I wanted them to be proper black, and I also felt like doing something slightly crazy, and once the idea had struck me, I also just wanted to see what the outcome would look and feel like. I guess “interesting” is a word for it. I’m not in love with them, but I also don’t hate them, and they are definitely attention-grabbing.

Leaving the house to give space to Ingrid and her friends for her birthday party, I went to the semi-annual crafts fair. Not intending to buy much, but I absolutely needed to visit Apmezga’s stand. For the last sweater I made with their yarn, I used three skeins of yarn and didn’t even wind the fourth one. I recklessly only brought three skeins for the current one. I’m almost at the end of the third skein and the sweater definitely isn’t finished. Unless I want a crop top. Which I don’t.

Apart from that, I bought a bag of wool felt scraps and some other assorted fabric off cuts. I don’t know what I’ll do with them, but they were pretty and cheap so why not.

And of course I always photograph interesting knitwear, for inspiration for future projects. Right know I’m thinking of knitting a sweater or cardigan with a round yoke. I’ve done seamed set-in sleeves, contiguous shoulders of two kinds, raglan sleeves both top-down and bottom-up, but not a round yoke, so I’m curious to try it out.

The last assignment for the “black, white and a colour” embroidery course. Deadline this weekend. I had an idea, and I tried it out, and it didn’t work out at all, so I ripped up an hour and a half of embroidery. That just means I get to do more embroidery, right? But with a bit more time pressure.

Visited an embroidery exhibition at Husby Gård community centre.

It’s so close to Spånga and so close to my interests but I had no idea it was there, until one of the other members of my Thursday embroidery club told me about it. Today was the last day of the exhibition, so the artist herself, Lena Larsson, was there.

I liked her bold use of colour, and the way she layered fabrics for depth. And the shapes, simple but not strict. Also all the hand-printed fabrics.

All her works (except one) at this exhibition were the same size, so it gave a very coherent impression. Most were grouped by colour theme – the red works, the green ones – and I wondered if she had planned them that way, but she said she’d made them without any such plan and grouped them afterwards.

There was one set of works that clearly had been made to belong together. I like the idea of realizing the same idea in multiple different, but coherent ways. I should do that myself.

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.

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.