The fifth and last session in my embroidery course, and today is about combining embroidery with painting.

I dug through our cupboards yesterday evening and found some fabric paint. The greens were from when I printed napkins. The purple I have no idea about and I’m not even sure if it was me who bought it, but it contrasts nicely with the green. A bit dried out and slightly lumpy, but after adding a splash of water it was perfectly functional again.

Adrian was immediately interested in joining me so we painted one square each.

When it was time to embroider, it was easy to be inspired by Adrian’s wild, spontaneous and chaotic design. The swirls and sweeps were crying out for swirly, sweeping embroidery.

As usual, we were out of time before I felt done. It needs more swirls.

I have a whole pile of half-finished embroidered squares now. Some I have an actual project idea for, others still need thinking. This one is going to be interesting enough that I would really like to find some kind of use for it, not just bundle it away somewhere. Maybe I need a pretty bag for… something?

Slippery, hard little seeds absolutely everywhere. But the result – candied quince – is so worth it.

This is my second favourite shopping bag. I am a big fan of cotton shopping bags. More comfortable than nylon bags, much, much more comfortable than plastic, more durable and weatherproof than paper.

My most favourite shopping bag is one that Ingrid sewed for me at school a couple of years ago. It’s orange, with patterned handles, and lives permanently in my handbag whenever it is not in use, so I always have it at hand.

This one and its identical twin I remember buying at a book store in Estonia when Ingrid was three years old. I use them for all my grocery shopping.

The two bags have held up for over thirteen years and are only now starting to show significant wear. The handles are fraying, and there are tiny holes here and there.

Just replace them with new ones, I thought. Reusable bags are so trendy now – there’s so much choice and they’re everywhere. But after thirteen years of very frequent use, I’m picky. I know exactly what I want from my bags, and it’s not easy to find a replacement that delivers.

Many bags have stupidly long handles. I guess you’re supposed to carry them on your shoulder, because if I hold them in my hand, the bottom drags on the ground.

Many are too large for use as grocery bags. Load them full, and they’re too heavy and bulky to carry comfortably. For people who drive to the supermarket, perhaps, or for carrying or storing lighter items.

Many are in unbleached, undyed cotton. Stylish but completely impractical. Others are all black, and I realize this one isn’t technically that far from all black, but the stripes make all the difference, in my opinion.

I can either sew a new bag (and I know from experience that that takes me two hours), or spend fifteen minutes and 200 kr to buy a new one and then maybe still not be satisfied – or I can spend those same fifteen minutes replacing the handles on this one. Not a difficult choice.

As a bonus I even darned one of the holes, just because I felt like it.

Ingrid spotted these mini-pancakes at the supermarket that looked just like the quark pancakes we had in Estonia. I think we both knew these wouldn’t be as good, even before opening the package, but some part of us still hoped. And of course they were nothing like the Estonian ones. The Estonian quark pancakes (which even came in several varieties, like one with banana and one with oats, I believe) were delicious enough to eat as a snack straight from the bag. These quarkless Swedish ones were bland even after heating. The quark makes a difference, of course, but store-bought Swedish pancakes are also always disappointing compared to home-made ordinary pancakes. I don’t know what they do with them – or what they don’t do. Skimp on butter and fry them in oil?

I haven’t quite reached as far as I had last time, but I’m getting very close. And the result looks better this time. You probably can’t see any difference in the photo, and even I sometimes can’t tell the two balls apart (hence the little row markers) but when I look carefully at the overall colour gradient, I can see it. So it was worth it.

Now that I’m getting close again, I’m starting to realize I might run out of yarn before the cardigan is as long as I want it to be. So I might need another ball of the same colourway. And if I do, odds are there will be a slight mismatch again so I have to do a fade, which means I need to decide well before I’m all out of yarn.

For lack of a better subject (I do struggle with photography when the evenings are so dark) I was going to take a photo of the last out of five bags of coins that I’ve worked on getting rid of. I checked both local supermarkets and both were happy to accept even quite large amounts of coins. In ICA you have to insert them into a coin slot one by one, but Coop’s machines have a funnel where you just pour whatever coins you have and it then slowly chugs through them all. Adrian often goes with me to the supermarket and he’s quite enjoyed helping me out with this.

I’ve been doing pretty well at remembering to tuck a coin baggie in my pocket when leaving the house, so we’re now down to the last bag with the smallest-denomination coins. That’s worth a celebratory photo, right?

Except Nysse was nearby. The shiny, clinky heap of coins attracted him immediately, and he decided it was now his. He lay down on top of it like Smaug on his hoard, and proceeded to defend it from me. In the first photos I took only about five coins were visible, because all the rest were hidden underneath Nysse.

When I stopped moving the coins around (because of the threat of claws) he lost interest. A hoard is much more fun when someone else actively admires it.

Nysse was gone all day yesterday and all night as well. We were getting worried because that’s not his normal pattern these days, now that the nights are cold and dark, and we don’t have a tracker on him any more.

I woke up before seven, and instead of going straight back to sleep, got up to check if he was waiting to be let in. He wasn’t.

When I got up for real an hour later, he had finally come home and gotten breakfast. He was extra cuddly all day, spending hours sleeping in my lap. Even to the point that, when I removed him so that I could stand up and go to the kitchen for lunch, he followed me and jumped up in my lap again. Usually he just gets annoyed with us when we move him while he’s sleeping, and goes away to find a better place to sleep. “I didn’t want to be with you guys anyway if you’re going to be behaving like that.” It makes me think that perhaps he did actually get lost again, and was happy and relieved to find his way home to us. I wonder where he went.

Now he’s safely asleep right next to me on the sofa.

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.