It’s so dark in the afternoons and evenings, now that we’re back to winter time. Takes some getting used to. Plus it’s been cloudy, so I feel like it barely gets light even in the middle of the day. And it’s only going to get darker, and it’ll be three months before it gets lighter than this. Maybe we’ll have a bright, snowy winter.

Anyway, today being a Sunday and me having no work to do, I spent all the best daylight hours embroidering.

The swirly thing on fabric that Adrian painted got a few more swirls and feels done now. Its sibling that I painted myself is still waiting for me.

The pieces of patterned fabric gave me so many ideas that I ended up making four of them. I finished both the embellished one and the one with tentacles that Adrian asked for, as you can see in the photo, and two more where I had previously started exploring other ideas.

The patterned fabric I actually came up with a project for, which I’m really pleased about. I’d much rather use the embroidery than put it away in storage. I’ll let them rest for a week or two, then see if I want to add anything more, and if not, start assembling them into a fabric box.

The fifth and last session in my embroidery course, and today is about combining embroidery with painting.

I dug through our cupboards yesterday evening and found some fabric paint. The greens were from when I printed napkins. The purple I have no idea about and I’m not even sure if it was me who bought it, but it contrasts nicely with the green. A bit dried out and slightly lumpy, but after adding a splash of water it was perfectly functional again.

Adrian was immediately interested in joining me so we painted one square each.

When it was time to embroider, it was easy to be inspired by Adrian’s wild, spontaneous and chaotic design. The swirls and sweeps were crying out for swirly, sweeping embroidery.

As usual, we were out of time before I felt done. It needs more swirls.

I have a whole pile of half-finished embroidered squares now. Some I have an actual project idea for, others still need thinking. This one is going to be interesting enough that I would really like to find some kind of use for it, not just bundle it away somewhere. Maybe I need a pretty bag for… something?

This is my second favourite shopping bag. I am a big fan of cotton shopping bags. More comfortable than nylon bags, much, much more comfortable than plastic, more durable and weatherproof than paper.

My most favourite shopping bag is one that Ingrid sewed for me at school a couple of years ago. It’s orange, with patterned handles, and lives permanently in my handbag whenever it is not in use, so I always have it at hand.

This one and its identical twin I remember buying at a book store in Estonia when Ingrid was three years old. I use them for all my grocery shopping.

The two bags have held up for over thirteen years and are only now starting to show significant wear. The handles are fraying, and there are tiny holes here and there.

Just replace them with new ones, I thought. Reusable bags are so trendy now – there’s so much choice and they’re everywhere. But after thirteen years of very frequent use, I’m picky. I know exactly what I want from my bags, and it’s not easy to find a replacement that delivers.

Many bags have stupidly long handles. I guess you’re supposed to carry them on your shoulder, because if I hold them in my hand, the bottom drags on the ground.

Many are too large for use as grocery bags. Load them full, and they’re too heavy and bulky to carry comfortably. For people who drive to the supermarket, perhaps, or for carrying or storing lighter items.

Many are in unbleached, undyed cotton. Stylish but completely impractical. Others are all black, and I realize this one isn’t technically that far from all black, but the stripes make all the difference, in my opinion.

I can either sew a new bag (and I know from experience that that takes me two hours), or spend fifteen minutes and 200 kr to buy a new one and then maybe still not be satisfied – or I can spend those same fifteen minutes replacing the handles on this one. Not a difficult choice.

As a bonus I even darned one of the holes, just because I felt like it.

I haven’t quite reached as far as I had last time, but I’m getting very close. And the result looks better this time. You probably can’t see any difference in the photo, and even I sometimes can’t tell the two balls apart (hence the little row markers) but when I look carefully at the overall colour gradient, I can see it. So it was worth it.

Now that I’m getting close again, I’m starting to realize I might run out of yarn before the cardigan is as long as I want it to be. So I might need another ball of the same colourway. And if I do, odds are there will be a slight mismatch again so I have to do a fade, which means I need to decide well before I’m all out of yarn.

The fourth embroidery class out of five. Today’s topic: appliqué.

I took a picture of my early design, when it was just wrinkled pieces of fabric laid out on top of each other, and then forgot to photograph the final result. For once I actually finished the day’s exercise during class. Almost… I stayed for an extra five minutes after the end. And then I felt like I was keeping the teacher from cleaning up the classroom so I rushed to pack up and leave, and photography didn’t even enter my mind. I’ll have to share a photo later because I was rather pleased with the result, especially after only an hour and a half of working on it. It’s got little seed pearls and everything.

Apart from the background, the material for this piece was all scraps of fabric that have been waiting for their time in the scrap bag in my fabric chest. I remember the scrap of green (which is the same fabric as the dark yellow one but seen from the reverse side – some kind of fancy expensive curtain fabric) coming home with Ingrid from daycare for some reason, and then never getting used. I only had an irregular piece, about 15 x 20 centimetres. Never found a use for it, but I saved it anyway – together with other treasures such as some smurf blue polyester with a Hello Kitty print and white polyester fleece with cats on, etc. I had some vague idea that the kids might want them for some random art project. Now they have outgrown the age of random art from scrap, but I haven’t.

If I have all these options to choose from, I don’t need to limit myself to just one, do I?

Also, Adrian asked for tentacles. Because obviously.

So this second one will have tentacles, and use colours that match the cool tones of the original fabric.

Another Monday, another embroidery.

Today’s theme: embroidering on a patterned fabric. I had so many ideas that it was difficult to choose. Do I embellish what’s there? Add more of the same? Fill in the background? Add something entirely different and divergent? Matching colours, or new colours of similar coolness, or black and white?

I settled on simple embellishment, with the colours same-ish but all warmed up.

Our homework for the embroidery course this week was to take a stitch and play around with it – explore and experiment. The teacher set very low expectations because many in the group are beginners, and I knew I wanted to do more than that.

I had bought the book that she based the course on and found a nice idea there. Take a square of fabric, divide it into smaller squares, and fill each one with a different variation of the stitch. The book suggested 3×3 squares and that seems very reasonable. But at the same time… if I only do nine variations on the same stitch, I’m not going to get any really interesting results. I need to get the obvious ones out of the way and get to the point where I need to push myself. 4×4 would be much better. But I decided to go all in and do 5×5 squares. Kind of going overboard, I know, but I think it’ll be good.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on it every evening this week. It’s a fair amount of work, but it’s also very relaxing. There are no expectations. I won’t be hanging it on the wall or on a piece of clothing or anything else. Nobody is going to look at it for more than a minute except for myself. Nobody will care how tidy the rear side is. (It totally isn’t. I wasted no time on fastening the ends at all. It’s all loose bits of yarn all over.)

Long stitches. Short stitches. Stitches of even lengths and of uneven ones. Lined up and offset. Thin yarn and thick yarn and even thicker yarn. Smooth cotton and fuzzy wool. Straight lines and curves. One colour, two colours, a gradient.

Second session of my embroidery course. The focus today was on different embroidery stitches, at a very basic level. The course had no prerequisites so we’re really starting from almost zero here. I have used all of the stitches in the past so I didn’t learn anything new today. It didn’t feel polite to just skip the exercise, and I tend to be polite towards people who deserve it, so I kept following along, but I switched to my self-portrait from last week when it all felt too slow.

The self-portrait was meant to be our homework, but with me gone hiking for four days and spending the night before packing, I really had no time to work on it. There will be new homework for the upcoming weeks, so the self-portrait will have to wait until the course is finished.

The embroidery course I signed up for as one of my habits and commitments started today. The theme of the course is “free-form embroidery”, i.e. embroidery without a pre-prepared design. Making things up as you go.

For this first session (out of five) our teacher threw us in at the deep end and tasked us with embroidering a self-portrait. Take a selfie with your phone and then translate it into embroidery – as if we were drawing a picture with needle and thread instead of a pencil. The task felt very challenging beforehand, since I don’t think of myself as particularly good at drawing even with a pencil. But we were there to have fun and, as the teacher kept reminding us, it’s not like middle school where we will be graded on our work. Nobody will check the tidiness of the rear of our embroidered piece; nobody will comment if the stitches are uneven.

We had just over an hour of stitching time and by the end of it I just had a few contours. No eyes, no mouth, no hair. But it’s clearly the beginnings of a face, and a reasonable likeness – if a stranger had to pick the model out of the whole class, they would likely pick me. So I’m pretty pleased with it. I had expected to get much further in the time we had. I’ll have to finish it at home.