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.

The rules for this dogma embroidery: A light-coloured fabric. A circle, divided into five parts. Threads in the same general colour as the fabric but in different values, one for each part of the circle. Use only the hash stitch.

I used a piece of a very old fabric dying experiment by Eric, from well before we met. He was about to throw them out at some point and I said no, I’ll take them. They’re smallish pieces of fabric and mostly not in my favourite colours, so they’ve stayed in the fabric stash. A greenish-yellow piece, with a bit of a spring vibe to it, was perfect for this.

As usual, I badly underestimate how long this kind of work takes. A 12-centimetre circle, that’s nothing! But it took me two evenings.

Ingrid and I went to the movies and then for a sushi lunch afterwards. We also bought a saucepan for 30 kr at the flea market on Hötorget and browsed fun shops like Sostrene Grene, and Sudd & Kludd.

We saw Flow, the animated movie about the cat in the flood. It was the first time for Ingrid and the second time for me – I saw it in January, catching it just as it looked like it was ending its run in the cinemas, and liked it enough to be happy to watch it again.

I liked how the animals in the movie are very clearly still animals, even though they’re more intelligent than normal animals – unlike many children’s movies where animals are just humans in other shapes. The dogs here can’t help chasing things, the cat is mesmerised by things swinging back and forth in front of it. The cat makes small meep sounds when distressed, even when nobody is nearby, just like real cats do.

The animals are intelligent enough to understand each other somewhat, even though they don’t have language. I also understand them somewhat, but mostly not all the way. It’s difficult to interpret an unfamiliar animal’s body language. What does the capybara actually think is going on? No idea. Are the other dogs bullies or just clueless? Don’t know. Why are the birds so bothered by one of them helping the cat? Who knows.

A lot of stuff has clearly happened in the world where the story takes place. I wonder how much of an actual back story there is in the creators’ heads, and how much of the world-building is hand-wavy “it just is that way”.

The cat in Flow looks quite similar to Nysse so I couldn’t help imagining Nysse in all those distressing situations. It was a bit like watching movies where kids get hurt, but not quite as bad. (I really struggle with that since having children.) Worse the first time; now at least I knew that it wouldn’t get hurt for real.

Sushi, by the way, is horrendously expensive these days. As is all eating out, really. I thought it was bad when a sushi lunch went up to 130 kr a couple of years ago. Now we’re at 160 for lunch and 200 kr for a la carte. My salary has not gone up 50% in the same time period.

The internet informed me that you could “fry” eggs in heavy cream. I like eggs and I like cream, so I tried it out.

Really it’s not so much frying as cooking, perhaps even caramelizing. The cream and eggs go in a cold pan and then you heat them together, until most of the water in the cream has evaporated and the eggs are done – which, fortuitously, happens at roughly the same time.

The first bite tasted just like normal fried eggs. That’s because it was just the eggs. The second bite had a fair bit of the reduced, caramelized cream, and was delicious.

Normally, frying is not my favourite way of preparing eggs. When I do fry eggs, it’s either because I’m in a hurry, or because the dish calls for them (for, say, pytt i panna/potato hash). I prefer my eggs on the creamier side, and the crisp underside of fried eggs is OK but not my favourite. This cream-cooking process is slower, so there’s less crisp, and at the same time the cream makes the temperature more self-regulating so I don’t have to watch it all the time. I think I like it.

March weather continues to be its disappointing self, with cloudy skies and near-zero temperatures, and actual spring nowhere in sight. Every year I remind myself that March is not actually spring, and every year I let myself get tricked by those first few warm days into believing that this year is different.

No, it’s not.

Here’s a photo of hellebores from a week ago. What’s out there right now does not deserve to be photographed.

I forgot my glasses at home today. It wasn’t too bad at work – I can see the monitor well enough, it’s just a bit tiring. What was unfortunate was that this happened on an embroidery club day, and I’m in the middle of a section of dark grey thread on dark grey fabric, which is rather hard to work on when you can’t see it well.

One of the other ladies there had an extra pair that I could borrow. I was most sceptical, because they were more than twice as strong as my own reading glasses. I tried them out anyway, and it was like wearing a pair of magnifying glasses – as long as I held the embroidery work at exactly the right distance. They were totally useless for seeing anything else, especially the rest of the room. But with their slim design, I could push them down on my nose, grandma style, and look over them for everything else.

Maybe I should buy extra strong embroidery glasses for myself as well. Or maybe I should get an actual eye exam done and not just buy off-the-shelf glasses that seem good enough. On the other hand, I have a whole list of things to buy that seem more urgent than slightly better glasses, so maybe not.

I am trying out a pattern for felted double slippers. You knit two conjoined slippers, which results in a shape that initially makes no sense and couldn’t possibly be anything, and then you turn half of it inside out, inside the other half, and boom, an actual slipper.

They look huge, which is as it should be, because the next step will be to felt them by machine washing them using a non-wool programme. That will be interesting. I’m using the exact yarn that the pattern recommended, but even with larger needles than they suggested, mine came out a few centimetres smaller than they should. I hope that they will nevertheless shrink to a suitable size when felted.

The socks I knit are all anatomically shaped and asymmetric, and I saw no reason to do anything differently with the slippers. Why would I want a rounded toe when my feet are not rounded? I’m not a cat. The shape is not too different from the original so it will hopefully felt equally well.

I’m curious why the pattern makes the two halves of each slipper exactly the same size. If you want one half to fit well inside the other, shouldn’t it then be slightly smaller? Maybe they wanted to keep the pattern as simple as possible.

I’ve been putting off the actual felting, always with some excuse. The electricity price is too high. I don’t have time today to invest several hours in this. But really I believe I’m a bit nervous about the felting not turning out well and then this will all feel like a lot of wasted work.