I’m all done with my embroidered circles!

Eighteen circles in total, counting circle-within-circle as one when the inner and outer circle form part of the same design, and as two when they are separate designs.

When I look at the whole design, it makes me think of a map of constellations, or the symbols on a Sami drum.

There is the Web, and the Coiled Chain, and the Fence. And the Big Wheel, the Little Wheel and the Dark Wheel. The Sun Flower, and the Little Flower. The Crow’s Tracks, and the Little Black Thing.

It’s all simple stitches: running stitch, backstitch, chain stitch, and blanket stitch, with some satin stitch and some freeform no-name stitching. This last one is called feather stitch in English, but when I learned it in Estonian we called it “crow’s feet stitch” (varesejalapiste) and that’s how I think of it.

I am adding more circles to my skirt.

I’ve never embroidered with wool before. It feels nice, but it is also kind of challenging. Wool is scratchy, so the yarn tends to get tangled up more than I’m used to. And this yarn is surprisingly fragile. When I get a knot and try to unpick it with my fingers, I sometimes end up unpicking the yarn itself. I’ve also broken it several times just by trying to pull my stitches tight. Some stitches can be looser, but blanket stitch has to be tight or it goes all crooked.

I’ve started on the embroidery on my skirt-to-be and it is coming along nicely.

The first skirt turned out nice so I started on another one. This one will be bolder, in bright red and with embroidery on the front. Same stretchy wool fabric as the first one.

What to embroider, though? That was the difficult question.

Definitely nothing corny like hearts or butterflies or flowers. Vines or leaves, like ivy maybe? No, I have a green skirt that I also want to pimp up, and leaves and vines would look better in green than in red.

An animal of some kind, like the lizard towel I made for my brother? There are lots of cool, clever animals – dragons and cats and ravens and octopuses and elephants. The problem with putting an animal in such a prominent position, though, is that it becomes a statement. (Does in my head, at least.) Cats, for example, are nice – but I don’t care so much about them that I would want my only bold skirt to be a cat skirt. And they’re all a bit cliché as well, somehow, to be personal. Especially since I cannot draw well enough to draw them from scratch. I’d have to google for a picture to start from, and then it would be like wearing clip art on my skirt.

Anything even vaguely symbolic has the same problem. All of it has been appropriated by fashion designers, so it wouldn’t feel mine. I love Celtic knotwork designs, for example, and doodled some of my own many years ago. But now everybody and their dog has a knotwork tattoo.

Something completely abstract, then? Yes.

Circles. Circles are common in both traditional Estonian and Swedish embroidery, which feels fitting. Less common than flowers, but common enough that I’ll be able to find some inspiration. Circles it’ll be.

This decision was followed by lots of experimenting with cardboard circles. I like tangible design tools, digital sketching is not for me.

Like this? Fewer? Larger? More filled or more empty?

Most of current fashion is so far from my taste that I struggle to find clothes that I want to wear.

Take skirts, for example. I like A-line skirts that reach at least the top of my knees. Straight, narrow skirts I cannot walk in; short skirts I cannot sit in. I rather like being able to do both, freely and without worrying about my clothes.

I’m generally cold, so for winter wear I prefer wool.

And I want my clothes to look at least somewhat interesting. Not for the sake of whoever may see me in those clothes, but for my own sake. Plain flat cloth in a single colour (or even worse, a non-colour like black or navy or beige) is simply depressing. I want interesting fabrics, or panels of different fabrics, or drapes and folds, or lace or embroidery or appliques, or funky pockets. Anything!

There are probably places that sell these kinds of skirts, somewhere – but not the high street stores or the major online retailers. All the skirts in my winter wardrobe (with one exception) I bought before we moved back from England. That makes them over 10 years old, and some are definitely at the ends of their lives.

During this Christmas break I gathered my courage and sewed a skirt. Yay!

I have very little experience at sewing clothes. The actual stitching part is easy. The hard part is making it fit. I can sew sofa cushions and dress-up costumes or plush toys without much of an effort: I just put some pieces together and voilà, here’s a cushion! But a skirt needs to actually fit. Ready-made patterns usually don’t fit me well out of the box, so there would be measuring and adjusting the pattern and more measuring and then more of the same, and what if it ends up not fitting after all?

But I figured that I could manage a simple A-line skirt, especially if I chose a forgiving, slightly stretchy fabric. My new skirt is made of nice, warm, thick wool in a nice non-black colour. It has an asymmetrical hemline, and both lace AND a funky pocket! And it fits. (Phew!)

I hand-stitched the side seams, because the fabric was so thick that this was easier than trying to get three layers of it through the sewing machine. Once I’d done that, it felt wrong to machine sew the next part, so I just kept going by hand. It looks really nice this way – the seams are nearly invisible – but that’s a side benefit. I simply enjoyed the stitching.

One of the cousins (4 years old) wished for a Stål-Arvid superhero costume for Christmas. And “Stål-Arvid only wears gold”. Challenge accepted! (Waistcoat with cape, with golden everything.)

That lace edged curtain I finished some time ago.

Embroidering a kitchen towel for my brother for Christmas. Mum gets a towel with an elephant, since she collects them. My brother doesn’t collect lizards but lizards are cool as well as cute. (Since I’ve fallen behind on the blogging, I’m posting this a wee bit after Christmas so it’s safe!)

I finally sewed a curtain to attach the lace to, that I crocheted months ago. I dithered for quite some time between putting the lace in front of the fabric or behind, and likewise between sewing it there by hand or by machine. Finally I decided that the lace is the main thing and has to go in front of the fabric. And because I still wasn’t sure about it, I sewed it by hand so that it will be easier to rip up and redo if I change my mind. Which, honestly, I don’t think I will.

There’s barely any daylight so I only had lamplight for my photos today. Now I hope I’ll remember to pick up my camera around noontime some day soon, so I can get of a photo of the finished curtain as a whole as well!

I don’t like throwing things away. I think it’s partly due to my Soviet childhood, when everything was scarce and you couldn’t just get another one when you broke the one you had. It wasn’t so with everything, of course, but that was my overall feeling: things that you valued needed to be treated with some care.