The older I get, the pickier I get. Or perhaps more charitably, the better I know my own likes and dislikes.

I’ve been trying to buy new everyday summer dresses for several years, but can’t find anything that’s to my liking. All I want is simple sleeveless knee-length dresses in cotton jersey, with a minimum of fuss. No ruffles, gathers, drapes, panels, cutouts or anything. When the weather is hot and I’m all sweaty, I want no extra seams touching me. But the current fashion is all about fussy details, and besides, jersey dresses currently tend to either be mini-short or maxi-long.

I’ve got two comfy home dresses that I actually like, both about 10 years old. In desperation I’ve bought two others – because it’s hard to get through a hot summer with just two – but they’ve both got scratchy “stuff” so I only end up wearing them in emergencies.

As usual, necessity is the mother of crafting. I bought several bolts of nice jersey fabric at the crafts fair in February, as well as some basic dress patterns.

I haven’t really sewn much clothing before. Plenty of curtains, sofa cushions, dress-up costumes etc, but nothing that actually needs to fit. One can get away with all sorts of hacks and shortcuts when sewing a wizard hat in polar fleece – but not with a dress.

The pattern looked like the clothing patterns I remember my mum tracing from Burda Moden magazines in the 1980s. Except the Burda pattern sheets had tens of items all on the same sheet, so you had to trace the ones you wanted, whereas these modern ones are apparently meant for single use. I couldn’t make myself cut up my pattern, though – because what if I want a different size or something – so I traced it onto some old plastic shopping bags.

The scary thing about sewing, as compared to knitting for example, is that once you cut, you can’t undo it. With knitting you can just rip it up and reuse the yarn, but that doesn’t really work with fabric. I like my undo buttons.

To properly sew in jersey you’re supposed to use an overlocker, rather than an ordinary sewing machine, but I’m not going to spend thousands of kronor on a sewing machine when what we have works perfectly fine. I just zig-zagged everything. The seams don’t look as professional as overlocked ones, but they’re stretchy enough to be functional, and nobody is going to inspect my seams up close.

Getting a basic dress cut out and assembled – two short shoulder seams, two long side seams – took a couple of hours. And then all the hemming and finishing took the same again. The pattern even had neckline banding. The whole thing came out looking pretty smart.

I couldn’t think of a good way to photograph the finished thing, so I’ll have to take a selfie of me wearing it when it’s warm enough.

PS: The blog archives remind me that I have actually sewn two skirts.

Winter gravel has been cleared from many streets in central Spånga, but ours is clearly not prioritized yet. The street sweepers have reached the beginning of our hill but decided to turn back. Hopefully it’ll be our turn in a few more days.

For the sake of this backpack, I learned how to repair nylon coil zippers, when the stitching attaching the coil to the zipper tape wears out.

There’s nothing particularly special about the backpack. I got it for free when I joined tretton37, five and a half years ago. Since then I’ve gotten a new, more stylish bag, on which the zippers actually close without any need for mending. But I don’t want to switch. The bag is tied up with my daily habits, and changing my habits would be a bother.

The bottom is just the right size to fit one of my standard lunch boxes. My mousepad fits perfectly against the back. There is a perfect pocket for small stuff I always want with me (charging cable, pen, handkerchief, etc).

Also, by now it’s almost one of a kind. When I first got it, I could count on seeing dozens of similar bags at any tretton37 event, which made finding mine in the line-up a bit of a hassle. Now most people have switched to the new model, so mine stands out again.

My hand-knitted socks are getting their first holes, with the oldest and favouritest ones going first. I saw a hole in one, which led me to check a few of the other pairs and find three or four more. All under the big toe.

For most of them I have some leftover yarn, so I can achieve some very discreet mends – which is nice when I want to wear these to work.

I aimed for a photo of Nysse in the box. He wasn’t interested in posing.

Eric and I got a chocolate tasting experience as a Christmas gift from Ingrid and Adrian. We’ve had to reschedule it several times, for all kinds of reasons, but today we finally managed to make it happen.

I have to start by saying that Duane at Small Island Chocolates did a truly excellent job. Welcoming, knowledgeable, enthusiastic – he made this a really enjoyable experience. The tickets were sold through a generic “events and experiences” company so I was sort of prepared for a somewhat commercial and impersonal event, but this was the complete opposite. Several of the chocolate varieties we tasted came from Duane’s own chocolate plantation on Tobago, and we were offered pieces of nearly day-fresh batches of chocolate.

The far row had pieces of single-estate “bean-to-bar” chocolates made of cocoa from Tobago Cocoa Estate. A milk chocolate, then the same with added sea salt, then a dark milk, and finally a dark chocolate. To my surprise, I found the 58% dark milk chocolate the most complex and interesting one. I don’t generally like milk chocolate much – it’s too sweet and doesn’t taste enough of chocolate – and I was expecting the “dark milk” to be more “milk” than “dark”. But it truly combined the best of both worlds. (I bought two bars of it after the tasting to take home with me.)

The second row had adventurously flavoured chocolate bars, from white chocolate with cocoa and beetroot, through a chilli chocolate and a liquorice one, ending with a bar of 100% cocoa solids. I didn’t much like any of these, but tasting them with my full attention was interesting to say the least. The white chocolate wasn’t bad but really didn’t have much to do with chocolate. With the chilli chocolate, the chilli added heat but no actual flavour – once the chocolate melted in my mouth, the chilli heat was in the roof of my mouth rather than on the tongue, so it didn’t blend with the chocolate flavour at all, which kind of made it feel pointless. The liquorice chocolate turned out to contain not just liquorice but also salmiak, which gave it a chemical taste. Finally, the 100% chocolate had so much cocoa butter in it that my whole mouth felt like it was coated in butter, which was a distinctly unpleasant sensation. This was the only piece I actually spat out. Worse than liquorice, which is saying something.

The third and final row had truffles and pralines. The dark chocolate truffle was utterly delicious, and the pralines were not far behind. I guess the cream in the truffles and the ganache takes both of them into dark milk land, too – which kind of makes sense and explains why I like them so much.

(The lone piece of milk chocolate at the far left wasn’t left over because I didn’t like it, but because I kept it as my “palate cleanser”. Water is no good at rinsing out a coating of cocoa butter.)

The embroidery club actually happened this week! I was so busy embroidering that I only realized after we had packed up that I hadn’t taken any photos. So here’s a photo of one of the beautiful stairwells in Medborgarhuset, where the club meets.

I’m eating as much I used to, and barely getting any exercise (because commuting) but suddenly I’m hungry. I can barely make it home after work before. Today I didn’t; I was twenty minutes from home when I just couldn’t deal any more and had to buy myself a banana. The brain is supposed to use a lot of energy, isn’t it? Perhaps it’s all the intense learning I’ve been doing.