The Nordic Museum has an exhibition titled “Arctis – while the ice is melting”. It’s a mixture of climate science and facts about the Arctic regions and its people.

The climate part, which is what visitors meet first, was designed to be shocking and worrying, but I’m quite aware of all the shocking and worrying facts and statistics already, thank you very much, so I only skimmed it.

The interesting parts were the ones about the people and cultures. I especially enjoyed seeing all the hand-crafted clothes and tools. I like beautiful things made with care and attention. I also really liked the way the items were organized: mostly by type and function, rather than by origin, so sealskin trousers from the Russian far north stood next to similar clothes from Greenland, for example.

A new thing I learned about: glacial archaeology. Archaeologists are now prowling the edges of receding ice patches, finding things that have been hidden and protected by the ice for hundreds of years. When the ice thaws, the objects quickly deteriorate, so scientists try to find them as soon as possible.

The photo is from an ice-themed photo/light installation on the ceiling of the great hall of the museum.

Day 2 at Djurönäset. Our programme for the day didn’t start until 10 (I guess a significant part of the group were up late and some were probably expected to nurse hangovers) so I had time for a nice, long walk around the place before a late breakfast. The hotel grounds were extensive and there was both a rough and rocky trail with lots of ups and downs, and a flatter running trail.

We’re on a weekend unconference with tretton37 at Djurönäset. We had some organized talks and also a whole afternoon of open space sessions. One interesting session was about ikigai. In another we discussed the growth mindset vs fixed mindset concepts.

There was of course also fika, especially since today is the 10th anniversary of the company, and also quite a lot of free time – some of which we used for walking and admiring the views, and the sunshine.

The hotel has not only a spa but also a full-sized 25-metre swimming pool. Apparently most of the people in our group knew this from ads in the metro, so they came prepared with swimsuits. I hadn’t spent any time reading up on the place so I was unprepared, and disappointed at missing out on this opportunity. I enjoy swimming, and my enjoyment more than doubles when the pool is nearly deserted like this one was. But the hotel had swimsuits for guests to borrow, so I got to swim after all.

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

Ingrid, being a teenager, spends more and more of her waking time in her own room, doing her own stuff. I see less of her than I used to.

She does come down when she has a particularly large chunk of particularly boring homework to cram. She enjoys subjects where learning means understanding and reasoning, such as math and science. Even some parts of social studies, such as when they worked with ethics. But subjects such as history and geography on grade school level mostly means cramming facts. Names, years, terms…

The best way for Ingrid to learn those is to tell them to someone else, out loud. Today we did “home skills”. She has a test coming up soon, on the topic of food ingredients: meats, grains, dairy, vegetables etc. So she went through all her notes and told me all the facts. What inner temperature should pork be cooked to? What is margarine? What are pulses? What is the difference between hard cheese and cream cheese? Mostly sort of useful facts, but learning them by heart for a test is maybe not the best way…

First day back at the office.

One of my plants has died. I completely forgot about them during my Christmas break. Oh well.

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?

A second Christmas, with the extended Bergheden family.

Adrian on the skating rink, with a friend.

Surprisingly often he’s sitting or kneeling on the ice. It’s not that he can’t skate, or won’t skate. He does. But he doesn’t seem to see any particular need to be standing up all the time.

The same is true off the ice, which is why there are holes in all his trousers.

I’m too adult to be so unbothered by holes and stains. Which is almost a little bit sad.

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.