Common Kibitzing

 Slept in, did an hour of pilates and yoga, andthen curled up with a book and a small batch of popcorn (popped in the popcorn popper, with only a hint of butter with nutritional yeast and the last of the salad (spinach, cucumber, tomato, carrot, avocado).

Then I made some progress on my sewing, till Keldor popped a huge batch popcorn on the stove, using a generous amount of both oil and butter, to which he added salt and garlic powder, and sat down next to me. Of course, I packed my sewing away to keep the silk out of reach of the popcorn oils, and then I helped him eat it. This wasn’t wise, but sometimes reading and eating is too irresistible, especially when the junk version of the food simply appears within reach, with no effort on my part.

 

Not surprisingly, I took a nap afterwards. Then, after we washed hands an popcorn dishes, I resumed sewing for a while, till Keldor decided that it was time to die his hair again, so I put it away, carefully untangled his hair, and he disappeared to do wrap his hair in conditioning dye, and then soak in the bathtub while it worked. I should have resumed sewing, or done something useful. Instead I made the mistake of glancing at FB, and fast-forwarded myself past his bath time with no awareness of time elapsed.

 

He joined me on the couch for a bit of more scrolling, but this time occasionally sharing something interesting with the other, and then we did yoga and went to bed.

 

Finally, after weeks of looking out my window at green grass (which shouldn’t be possible this far north in December), today I woke to frosted trees, and during breakfast there were a first few tentative snowflakes drifting towards the ground. Please let us have some weeks of winter before the next thaw! 



I started my day with an hour session of yoga and HIT, followed by Qwirkle over breakfast (I won), and then a lovely walk. Still no real snow here (oh, how I long for snow!), never mind that Sweden has level red warnings over most of the country, with train tracks closed between Umeå and Sundsvall, so Charlotte gets to stay longer than planed, as her train tomorrow isn’t going.


( photos of the walk cut for easy scrolling past )
Still no real snow here (oh, how I long for snow!), never mind that Sweden has level red warnings over most of the country, with train tracks closed between Umeå and Sundsvall, so Charlotte gets to stay longer than planed, as her train tomorrow isn’t going. 

 

 After the walk Keldor decided that we should do the traditional Swedish New Years Day thing and watch Ivanhoe, which I had never seen. While most Swedes may watch it annually, they haven’t done it in my presence.

 

My assessment of the film: I don’t care if the plot punishes the bad guys at the end of the film, I really don’t like witnessing that level of unpleasantness, and I doubt that I will make an effort to see it again. Also, the film totally ignored the obvious romance that should have happened, between Rebecca and Rowena.

 

Then I sat down to see if I could do something about turning the extra right sleeve of my Silk bliaut short tunic in progress into a left sleeve. It worked. To fix the problem I opened up the seam between the front and back sides of the seam. Then I spread the side that is primarily blue on the table and used it as the pattern for how the mostly plum side should look. Since this should have been a left sleeve, and is a right sleeve, it means the colours are in the opposite position than they should be. To solve this I did a diagonal cut (green line in the sketch) to separate the pendant part of the sleeve (A) from the arm part of the sleeve (B), and unpicked the seam attaching the upper arm three-colours section (C) from the rest of the sleeve. Then I rotated part B and attached it to the other side of A. This piece isn’t symmetrical, so rotating it means that it is too big on one edge, and not big enough on the other (but I can’t just flip it, as the underside of the fabric is a different colour, which is how this problem came up in the first place). So I trimmed off the extra wide rectangular bit, and then took a scrap of the plum to fill in the missing triangle, before re-attaching part C.  The result is a sleeve half that has the correct colours in the correct position to be a left sleeve.





But now it is late, and I am tired, so I have taken notes so I can do this for the other half of the sleeve tomorrow. Is this pieced sleeve optimal? Nope. It looked better before I cut it up and put it back together. However, better this than messing up the alternating colour patterns, so I have to cope.

 

It took till 23:00 before she’d finished with the suggestions, which meant that it was nearly midnight before I had implemented them. This was the first time that I was awake on Monday at the start of unicornduke’s weekly crafts zoom session, and I have sewing projects I wanted to be working on.

 

Therefore, I tested to see if it is possible to roll my new computer stand with the big monitor into the kitchen. Yes, it is, of one goes through the larger doors through the entry hall.

 

This meant I could spread the Dusky plum silk fabric on the kitchen table (after raising it to a good working height, I love having a raise-lowerable work surface) and baste the body pieces of the Keldor copper trim tunic in progress to it while hanging out with people I hadn’t met before.

 

This turned out to be a delightful idea. I enjoyed their company and got two of the three pieces completely attached and the third started before we all scattered from the call at 02:00.

 

Not wanting to go to bed before I had finished the third, I checked first to see if perhaps Fjorlief or Thorvald happened to be on line and up for a visit just then, as I haven’t had a chance to catch up with either in ages. Neither saw my notes directly, so I opened the link to the video about the making of the Glass Dress that had been shared in the zoom chat and watched it till I had the third piece of handwoven wool from Barbara attached to the silk.

 

Then, knowing the rule “Don’t cut fabric after midnight”, I packed everything away, and went to bed.

 

I woke with the dawn light’s reminder at 08:00 that I should feed the cats and take my morning vitamins, so I did that and went right back to sleep.

 

I woke the next time at 11:00, with Keldor wondering if I was going to sleep all day (they had gone to sleep at least an hour earlier than I), so I got up. As we finished breakfast he asked us if anyone wanted to go check out a second hand store?

 

Yes, that sounded fun, so off the Robertsfors we went (a half an hour drive away).

 

I found a pair of maroon cotton sweat pants in 100% cotton, and he bought a set of window lights (because he wanted the lamp shades to cover the growth lights hanging over the plants in the kitchen window), a small pewter oil lamp, a fancy scarf in purple and yellow, and a couple balls of yarn, all for just over 100 kr (including my sweat pants). I don’t think any single item of that could have been purchased for that little new.

 

Then we went home, where I curled up o the couch with a book and they started watching TV. They were watching Mary Poppins Comes Back when I surfaced from my book and wandered to the kitchen, where I finally baked the Hallon eld småkakor, the dough for which had been sitting in the fridge in a yoghurt bucket ready to bake since 2025-12-06 a useful day at home.

 

I really had intended to bake the cookies the next day, but somehow that didn’t happen, nor on more next days than I had realised. Luckily, the dough still tasted good, though there was noticeably less of it as I had eaten the occasional ball of cookie dough in the meantime (yum!).

 

I tried feeding Keldor a cookie as soon as they came out of the oven, but they were both asleep on the couch by then (they were awake when I left the room).

 

Then I cooked up the rest of the Brussels sprouts that didn’t go into the Veg with spicy peanut sauce last week. I really should have cooked them sooner, the outer leaves all needed discarding, but the inner bits were still good cooked in garlic butter with a little sesame seeds and sunflower seeds.

 

After I ate and the kitchen was clean I returned to the couch, where they had woken up on time for the end of their movie, and I cut the lining one of the pieces of the Keldor copper trim tunic I had basted and started turning in the edges and sewing the silk to the wool as Rocky Horror Picture Show played on the screen.

 

Much to my delight, when Sofi and Hjalmar arrived yesterday he took out his knitting, some beautiful dark blue wool socks, which were worked from the knee down, he had passed the heels, and was closing in towards the toes. So he tried them on me several times over the course of the evening last night and today, adjusting them to perfectly fit my feet. This evening he finished them, and I am in love with these beautiful, comfortable socks!

 

After breakfast and a game of Qwirkle we resumed work on the create an attic bedroom project, and made some good progress. 



Tomorrow we need to go buy more supplies.

 

This evening we took Daniel's things (that we are storing till we can get them to him in Kiruna) over to Bryan's house to free up space in the craft supplies room to be a second guest room for visitors during the new years party. 

 

Then we watched the first episode of the new Ronja Rövarsdöttar while I worked on my silk bliaut short tunic. Then we joined friends in zoom for our workout session. I am so proud of Þórólfr, who is showing up and doing it, even though it is hard at his current fitness level. Hopefully this will improve that fitness level.

 

 

 

When the dishes were clean and put away he took the pot from the stove, swt it in the sink, and, forgetting that no one had ever turned the heat off, thinking that it had been cooling for a while, reached into the pot to grab the filter and wring it out. He manged to get his fingers all the way into the not quite boiling water and started to grip the filter before his nerves got their emergency distress message all the way to the reflex part of the brain to abandon that mission and turn on cold running water to cool them instead. 

 

After he lowered his skin temperature sufficiently i fetched him the burn ointment that a Blacksmith always has available, and he spent the day on the couch, applying more ointment whenever his fingers felt uncomfortable. 

 

There is no visible sign of damage, which is good, but he isn't interested in using that hand for projects today, either.

 

This is a shame, as we had planned to work in the attic on the insulation project to create an attic bedroom.

 

So, instead, I took the pieces of my silk bliaut short tunic and spread them out to figure out which pieces go where, and which one still need modifications to solve the problem with cutting it wrong. 

 

Over the course of the day I have even gone back and filled in notes in the still fairly new crafts section of this Obsidian vault, finding posts about some of this year's projects and linking to them on the project note, and pulling in photos, adding properties like start and completion dates, materials, catagories, etc. So now I know that painting the Living room ceiling stars took about a month and a half. 

Of course, none of those craft entries will show up on the github web page version of my blog till I am next at the computer to push them there.