Easter in Uppsala with my mum, as per tradition. She and the kids all like traditions and doing things the way they have always been done; makes me kind of restless to change something but I don’t really mind.

Herring and devilled eggs for lunch.

Pasha for dessert. We each have our own version, and while we all each both (because more pasha is always better) and like the other’s, we do think our own is just slightly better.

Lemon merengue pie after dinner.

And the painting of eggs, of course. Note which generation has been taught to straighten up and stop slouching, and which one hasn’t.

Ingrid, who’s the only one among us to regularly practise her craft, makes intricate little paintings.

Adrian focuses on fun designs. Body parts, and blue caterpillars.

My designs this year were inspired by the Desigual dress my mum was wearing, with black circular designs with eightfold symmetry.

Liljevalchs spring salon. As usual, an eclectic collection of works. Marble busts exhibited side by side with oil paintings and a sculpture made out of old shirts.

The first room was dedicated to Young Spring Salon as usual. I liked this pair of rabbits, in its simplicity.

Like last year, the works that I found most interesting tended to be textile in nature. Some embroideries, some crocheted pieces, some textile sculptures.

I liked these textile sculptures that made me think of alien plants.

The embroidery on these kitchen towels is based on food stains left behind by the artist’s grandchild. A series of five pieces: breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner.

My absolute favourite was a set of crocheted tree stumps. Incredibly detailed, with creatively chosen materials and techniques to create tiny fungi, lichens, bracket fungi, etc. All very prettily and dramatically presented in a darkened room in brown earth tones.

The photorealistic candy felt familiar. I think perhaps it was also represented last year. Still as eye-catching now as it was then. I had to walk up close and check that it really was a drawing.

It’s pasha season, but the cloth I used to line the pasha mould with went with Eric. (It was part of a juice strainer.) We can’t have Easter without pasha, so it is time to make a replacement.

Cordon Bleu, the kitchen goods store on Vasagatan, had not one but two kinds of muslin/cheesecloth. There is more of a market for this than I thought. I bought the smaller variety, 100% cotton, and my project for today was to sew a liner for the pasha mould.

It took forever. Literally hours and hours. It’s such a small thing – but that just means it has many small fiddly seams, and an awkward 3D shape. And all the seams needed to be enclosed, because we do not want bits of cotton thread in our food or between our teeth. And I must still be doing something wrong with my sewing machine because several times I did something that mucked up the tension on the bottom thread, and had to untangle it and re-do the seam.

But! Now I have a liner. I will be using it until the day that I die, to make it worth the effort. And then my children and my children’s children will be obliged use it until the end of their lives as well, until the cloth falls apart.

The pasha itself went much faster and easier.

Ingrid and I saw 1984 at Stadsteatern.

During much of the performance, sound was provided through headphones. It felt odd and kind of gimmicky at first, but it also worked. Winston’s quiet musings and diary entries could be delivered quietly, intimately. And the subtle hints of there being someone else there, prompting him and asking questions, also worked because these sounds could be subtle, barely there. A whisper is no longer a whisper if it is delivered through a loudspeaker, or by an actor projecting his voice through a hall.

Otherwise: intense, minimal, true to the original. (To the extent that I remember the original, which I last read, oh, thirty years ago?)

We’re back to dull and grey April weather, with heavy clouds and the hint of almost-rain in the air, so the first pink blossoms of the cherry trees in Spånga are a welcome splash of brightness.

I started knitting on the next cardigan during the conference trip to Italy. With a thicker yarn than I tend to choose, and a slightly looser knit, it knits up fast.

The yarn is Drops Lima, a lovely wool and alpaca blend. I love the way alpaca yarn feels.

The design is a very simple one and mostly my own. I’ve been eyeing the Ankers cardigan, but I didn’t like the high neck with no neckline shaping. (Any cardigan design that does not show a single photo of it worn fully buttoned, is probably not going to look good fully buttoned. Knitwear designers ignore neckline shaping and waist shaping way too often, in my opinion.)

Overall a round yoke seems simple enough, and the yoke on the Ankers is just bands of ribbing interspersed with increase rows, and I figured I could do that myself. I’ve knitted enough sweaters now to feel like I mostly know what I’m doing, and the Internet is full of helpful tutorials and guides.

It took a full evening of arithmetic (there are a lot of details that need to line up!) and one aborted attempt that I ripped up, and now I have something that looks like it will work out and fit me decently well. It looks better on me than on the table. Even then it takes a bit of imagination to add the missing details, such as button bands, neckline edging. I hope it all comes together the way I have it planned.

I originally made this sign for marking my locker at the tretton37 office. After ripping off the self-adhesive magnet strips, I have now pinned it to my chair at Sortera.

The older I get, the more picky I get about all kinds of things. Office chairs are definitely near the top of that list. I can deal with soft seats and hard seats and I am mostly not too bothered about the back rest, but I have very firm opinions about the armrests (no thank you), headrests (no thank you again), seat position and angle.

One of the best office chairs I’ve ever had was at ReQtest, where I sat on a large, inflatable exercise ball. Guaranteed no slouching. tretton37 had a variety of chairs so everyone could pick and choose, and when I could, I picked a saddle-style chair from Backapp.

Sortera doesn’t have anything as fancy as that, but they do have pretty good chairs. I’ve found one extra firm variety, on which it was also easy to remove the armrests and headrest. I’m not there every day, though, and sometimes the chairs move around on my WFH days. Now I’ve branded my favourite chair as mine, so I can find it again when I am in the office.

One of yesterday’s cakes: banana cake with chocolate and walnuts. Super moist, barely has any structural integrity even after cooling. It was a whole project to carefully slice it and stack the slices for freezing; I don’t think I’ve ever had to handle a cake with such care. Now I have banana cake in the freezer.

Electricity prices in the negative gave me a push to do three loads of laundry and two rounds of baking today. Sunny weather and a bit of wind made for perfect drying conditions.

Today was the first day warm enough for the team at Sortera to have lunch outside in the sun on the quay.

Today was also the day I found a last, lost, lonely lussebulle in a corner of the freezer. Still tasted good.