kareina

Yesterday was the final exam for the Swedish class I have been taking. I was not as prepared for it as I might have been, since I wound up missing a fair few class meetings due to travel this term, but it mostly went ok anyway. I did have problems with one section, which was meant to be testing us on our abilities to use the correct reflexive or possessive pronoun, but I didn't recognize some of the verbs they were paired with, making it hard to work out which of the list should be slotted into which sentence--I swear I never saw those particular words in the textbook. A good measure of how little I am stressed about the exam though--I never even bothered to look at the number of points each section was worth, so I have no idea if messing up that section (the other sections felt reasonably easy) is a minor or major difference in my total score.

( The most amusing part of the exam was the essay section. )

In the evening the Thursday folk dance session we have been attending lately was canceled due to the annual general meeting of the folk federation, in the same location as we normally dance. So we went along to it. The meeting started with a long presentation on a historic photo project one of the guys is doing--he has lots of old photographs from the 1800's that he is cataloging and archiving. I couldn't understand most of the talk, but it was interesting looking at the photos and the styles of clothing. After his talk they did the business meeting. I may be able to follow written Swedish, but can still only catch random words out of context when they are at full speed in the spoken language. The only reason I know that some things must have been put to a vote is because at random intervals everyone in the room chorused "Ja", but I never caught whatever clues there may have been to indicate that they were about to.

Fortunately, I was not relying on understanding the meeting to provide me entertainment. I brought along a long-neglected embroidery project to work on. That neckline was started in August of 2010, and while it is further along now there is still a long way to go (there were 4 leaves done then, now there are 12, out of 24 total to go all the way round the neck). This is the neck line for the new bliaut I have been working on off an on since December of 2010. The fabric for that dress is inclined to fray, so I have taken the approach of hemming each piece, and then sewing them together. At this piece nearly all of the pieces are hemmed (there are lots of them--the skirt has a total of 12 triangles which assemble to 4 sets of inset gores), so I had better finish the neck line, so that I can finish the dress.

Why haven't I been working on the embroidery all these months it has sat neglected? (I mean other than having gotten addicted to nålbinding and wanting to do that instead of other forms of stitching.) I think the reason is that zig.zag pattern around the edge of the design. The pattern comes from one of the statues in the Chartres cathedral--I did a simpler version of this (outline only) on my blue and red bliaut years ago. I decided to resurrect the design and do it differently for this one in part because I was teaching a class in laid and couched work embroidery at the last European Textile Forum I made it to, and wanted a design that was appropriate, and I had already done the work tracing the pattern from a photograph of the statue.

However, back when I did this for the other dress the photo I had made it look like there were parallel lines running around the outside of the leaves. More recently I saw a better photo someone else has of the statue, and it turns out that instead of parallel lines there is some sort of zig-zag thing happening. So I decided to give it a try. I like how it looks, but I do not like working it. The big advantage of laid-and-couched embroidery is that it is a fast way to fill in large areas. If I were trying to fill in parallel lines with this technique that part would be done already as it would take very few stitches to cover huge areas. Sadly, the zig-zags mean that there is no one area where the lines reach any length for that part, so it is slow and tedious. Slow and tedious enough that the project went back into its bag and got forgotten for months.

Needless to say, last night I made no attempt at the zig-zag bits, but only focused on the leaves. Part of me wishes that I had opted for straight lines instead of zig-zags this time, too, but I think there are now too many of them to make me feel good about ripping them out. So instead I will finish up everything else, and then decide what to do with the outer boarder...

One other nice feature of the annual general meeting is that people sell off old folk dancing accessories they have and don't use anymore. We managed to pick up two pairs of boots (one in his size, one in mine), an apron, a scarf, and a knitted cap for only 1750 SEK (less than €200). Buying these things new one could't get one pair of boots for that, and I don't even want to know how many hours went into that cap.