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.

Ingrid at 14, 15 and 16; then me and Eric some unknown number of years ago. She seems to be more or less done growing but did still gain another centimetre in the past year. Didn’t catch up with me yet, though!

We had a birthday dinner for Ingrid’s sixteenth birthday at a fancy trendy burger place, and home-made lemon merengue pie for cake of course.

I took a detour during my lunchtime walk to a nearby neighbourhood that has the prettiest autumn colours. Sörgårdsvägen is lined with large maples on both sides, and their colours are at their peak.

All three photos are taken from different points at the same crossing.

The neighbours’ house is still a half-finished eyesore. They started clearing the ground in April and the house already looked pretty house-shaped in June. Since then they’ve finished the facade but then not made any visible progress for some while. I’m getting tired of having to see heaps of building materials and construction waste every single day.

I’m also not very happy with the house itself. It’s boxy and bulky, clearly focusing on optimising for volume given the maximum permissible size, and makes no real effort to fit in. And did it really have to be black, to make the house look even larger and dominant? I wonder how that could seem like a good idea to anyone.

The glory of cherry trees in autumn colours.

This year is a good one, with the right kind of weather – the trees are blazing in reds and oranges and yellows.

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.

We have tickets for a chamber music concert series at Konserthuset and the first one was today. Piano, cello, violin and percussion.

Pejacevic’ piano trio was music of the romantic kind, definitely impressive but not to my taste. The kind of music where everything blends together and it’s a mass of notes rather than a melody. I find it difficult to keep my focus on this kind of music, to the point that I begin dreaming while awake. My brain has nothing to hold on to, so it starts making things up.

Shostakovich’ symphony No. 15 arranged for a chamber ensemble. I liked this a lot better, with the dialogue between the cello and the violin. It’s an interesting piece of music, with its quotes from other famous works. It was almost bizarre to suddenly get a burst of the Willam Tell Overture in the middle of the piece. It was also clearly a technically challenging piece, especially for the strings, veering into atonality.

We had front row seats, which I particularly like for small-scale classical music, because it allows me to see the musicians’ craft up close. Which is particularly nice when I find myself zoning out.

One thing I noticed this time was a digital sheet music stand that the violinist used, with a foot pedal for turning pages. I wish I could have gotten a closer look – sometimes it seemed to only redraw the bottom of the page, and I wonder what that was about.

The cellist and the percussion section used traditional sheet music. The pianist did so as well, with the help of a page turner. That seems like it might be a challenging task – it’s not just about reading the music but also keeping track of dal segno “navigations”, being unobtrusive while waiting… and not getting distracted.