It’s embroidery club Thursday.

I think I am actually done with the Stockholm embroidery. I’ve been hesitating about adding a little bit more, but I suspect I’d end up overworking it, so I’m stopping now. I did take a photo but the lighting in our meeting room is not very good and I only had the phone camera, and the picture did not do it justice. A proper photo will be coming up when I have it mounted and ready for hanging.

This week’s dogma embroidery: use fabric in the colour of your hair. Randomly sprinkle hole punch confetti on your circle of fabric and embroider them with star stitches. I had no hole punch so I made do with other pieces of paper. Afterwards I saw that others had fastened their confetti with their stitches; I had misunderstood and just used it to mark the spots where to put the stitches.

Tried swapping tires on the car this weekend, from winter to summer tires. Got the rear wheels done, but just could not get the bolts loose on the front ones, even though I have a long lug wrench for plenty of leverage, on which I hung with my entire body weight.

Admitted defeat, accepted the idea of paying for a tire swap, and took the car to the nearest, cheapest tire swap place. They gave it a try, then another one, and then gave up as well. I felt rather less ashamed of my puny attempts after that.

Perhaps I could have found some clever trick on the internet but I really didn’t want to spend more time on this, so I booked a time at an actual car repair workshop. They finally got the front tires swapped, for a cool 1000 SEK. Ouch.

Today was not my mum’s birthday, but we celebrated anyway. The kids are both very used to having birthday parties on some random day, chosen for reasons of practicality rather than calendrical accuracy. My mum is not quite as convinced that this is an acceptable way of doing things, but didn’t object to being offered dinner and cake.

For the cake part of things, Ingrid made and decorated macarons.

Raspberry and dark chocolate macarons, using freeze-dried raspberries both in the macarons and for decorations. Much less messy than fresh or puréed raspberries, very clever.

Remember the stiff white yarn I was struggling with? The internet reminded me to wash and block my swatches before drawing any conclusions. I did that, and the fabric was a lot softer afterwards. Actually floppy; much more wearable.

I also tried combining it with some white mohair (in the top half of this swatch) and the result was very nice. Fluffier and with more body than the wool on its own. It even looks a bit whiter – I’m not sure if the wool yarn is a teeny bit grey, or if it’s just the background shining through.

I had pretty much given up on the idea using the yarn for a dress, due to its lack of drape, and started picturing it as a sweater, holding the yarn double and adding mohair. I had even decided on a rough design. (A white sweater with a green design, something that could be a Christmas tree but could also just be a fir tree.) Now this swatch is making the dress idea seem not absurd, so it’s back in the game again.

I’ve been picturing a dress with the skirt knit sideways, with short rows in a contrast colour for shaping, something vaguely like this. An all-white dress seems impractical for everyday use, and the contrasting stripes would make it more versatile. However I have no idea how much fabric the yarn will knit into, and even if I did try to estimate, chances are I’d be wrong. I obviously have no way of getting more, so a skirt knit sideways seems risky. Make the skirt too long, run out of yarn too early, and I will have half an unwearable skirt. Make the skirt too short, and end up with unused yarn.

Today I was idly looking at my one and only (store-bought) merino wool dress, which is knit top-down, and realized that I could knit the white one top-down as well and just add embroidered vertical stripes afterwards. That would be a much more low-risk approach. I can knit a sideways skirt some other time, with store-bought yarn that I can top up when needed.

I proudly present to you these holes I drilled all by myself! I’m rather pleased with my drilling precision, given that this is my first time with metalwork.

The drilling was rather less straightforward than the sawing and filing. My first attempt with a standard metal drill bit failed. After a long struggle, I had nothing more than a tiny divot to show. (This is a trial hole in one of the sawed-off pieces, hence why it looks so sloppy.)

The weekend after I went off to Bauhaus and bought drill bits made for high-density stainless steel. This weekend I put them to use, and the difference was immediate. With them, it was no struggle at all to drill through the steel pipe.

Färgfabriken had their design fair this year again. I found out about it last year but I suppose it is an annual thing.

Most of it is stuff I am not at all interested in buying, so I mostly saw this as an excuse for a bicycle trip in the spring sun, and an opportunity to look at pretty, shiny things. An awful lot of prints again (do people actually decorate their homes with colour prints of tongue-in-cheek sayings?). Ceramics in pastel colours and silver jewellery were popular again. I think half the sellers were the same ones as last year, and they had even set up in the same spots.

Last year I bought a small ceramic plate, and I was actually hoping that the guy would be back again, because I am in “need” of small plates for serving small appetisers. He wasn’t there, though.

Instead I was instantly charmed by a photographer selling prints of his photos of flowers and insects. I couldn’t stop thinking of them, and ended up buying two. I have to hang them up at home first before I can share photos, though.

I girded my loins and felted the slippers! Blogging about a problem(ish) got me unstuck, not for the first time.

In their original, unfelted state, the slippers measured 37 cm from heel to toe. A standard wash and centrifuge cycle in the washing machine took them to 28 cm. That was still a bit too large, so I put them back in for a brief 30-minute cycle, which shrunk them by another centimetre or so. Shaping them and putting one half inside the other stretched them out a little bit again, so the end result was back to 28-ish. Maybe a teeny bit too large? Maybe not. It’s too warm to wear them now so I’ll have to see next season.

I was concerned that the inner layer would get bunched up, since it’s the same size as the outer one, but slightly wet felt turned out to be very squishable, and it formed itself very nicely. Or perhaps it was the outer one that stretched to fit the inner one. Either way, no bunching, no wrinkles, very slipper-like shape. Overall, a success.

Spring!

In eight grade, Swedish schoolchildren get to do practical work experience. The concept is called prao in Swedish. Kids spend two weeks at an actual workplace, doing real work.

This is Adrian’s second week of prao at a Brillo Pizza, and I stopped by to see him at work.

The first challenge is to find a prao place. Some find a place through friends and family, but I couldn’t find anything suitable at Sortera. (It’s all either office jobs, or work that is too dirty and dangerous for an inexperienced underage worker.) Adrian spent hours searching, both online and just walking from place to place, before landing a prao place at Brillo Pizza near Odenplan.

I got to order a pizza from Adrian, pay him for it, and watch him make it fresh for me. I found out that pizzerias have machines to flatten balls of dough into standard-sized pizza bases.

I also learned that they pre-portion all the toppings such as cheese in plastic cups during slow periods, so when it’s time to make a pizza, there’s no measuring or guessing – just grab a cup and spread its contents on the pizza. A standard pizza gets 110 grams of cheese. A pepperoni pizza has exactly 14 slices of pepperoni, and a kebab pizza gets 80 grams of meat.

Adrian made a pizza for himself as well and then we could have lunch together. We both opted for a “Maggan”, which is a fancy margherita topped with extra mozzarella after it’s baked. (Mine is half-sized since I don’t eat like a growing teenager any more.)

From paper archives to digital ones, I’m clearing out decades-old junk.

It’s junk now, but definitely wasn’t back then. Now all our data is online, but there was a time when all of it was on CDs. Everything from installation files for operating systems, important applications, and games. These days, the application might be an online service and not even have a presence on your computer. If there is a local installation, then you download it. Back then you bought a physical CD in a shop, or ordered it online and got it in the mail.

Backups of your important documents – online today, CDs back then. Photo sharing likewise.

Under and behind the piles of nostalgia-inducing CDs was a pile of 3½-inch floppy disks. Why? Who knows.

There’s a fair amount of memories tied to these CDs, and all the others in the same drawer. I’m feeling a tiny temptation to keep them. But what would I even do with them? If it was old photos or documents or books, I could imagine bringing them out decades from now and showing them to my grandchildren or something. But CDs? You can’t gather around them because you can’t even see what’s on them. They’re just pieces of plastic.