kareina

This weekend was the event "The Tailor's Story, or, There Will be Cheese". It was so much fun!

It didn't have many things I normal associate with SCA events (like lots of hugs/cuddles, singing and dancing), because we were attempting to respect social distance, despite the fact that about 40 of us were gathered in one place. But it was still wonderful to be there, and had a number of highlights for me. ( the summary thereof went to five pages! )
I should have resumed the Norrskensfesten workshop correspondence (that I interrupted Friday when I left for the event and never resumed because busy/no phone) at that point, but instead just caught up on reading FB till it was time to head to Swedish folk dance this evening (I did ask our dance teacher if she wanted me to stay home, given that I had just spent the weekend with 40 people, and she said it was ok with her if I came, so I did, because, dance!). There were only three of us dancing this week, and we worked on Slunga I tre takt, Gammal venster från Oviken, Mellparing, and Senpolska från Gimgalen, which are some rather challenging, but fun, variants on Swedish Polska dances.

Now I should do today’s yoga and get to bed—I have rather a lot on tomorrow’s calendar.

Yesterday was the julfest for the local folk music and folk dance group, and it was much fun. They had an afternoon of crafts projects, followed by the party in the evening. They had supplies and instructions for a variety of projects, or people were welcome to bring whatever project they wanted to work on. That was scheduled for 12:30-16:30, and the party was to start at 17:00. I originally thought to spend the whole day, but during the morning I felt more like curling up on the couch re-reading The Mystic Marriage, and didn't actually get out there till nearly 15:00.

When I arrived there was a small group of people happily working on projects, and another small group in the kitchen cooking for the party. I joined the crafts people, and made progress on finishing the new, improved pocket on my winter coat till it was time to clean up and set up the tables for the party. We managed to get the last of the tables up and decorated (when did they start making such cute strings of tiny battery-operated Christmas lights? they looked great twined with strings of tinsel on the tables) about the time the musicians started getting out their instruments, and I happily spent the rest of the time till it was time to sit and eat dancing to the Christmas music they were playing (many of which are Swedish song only, others exist in Swedish translation but were originally in other languages). There wasn't much room between the musicians and the tables, but since I was the only one dancing just then, it wasn't a problem.

One of my friends commented that I am always dancing, and I pointed out that I was planning to eat lots of risgrynsgröt, so it was important to dance as much as possible. There were 26 of us for the party itself, so we had four tables with three seats on each side, and at two tables there was an extra chair at the end. I took one of the extra chairs, and the only other child (a 12 year old) took the other.

The meal was traditional, but simple--thinly sliced ham and other toppings for open faced sandwichs plus the above mentioned rice porridge. I never really liked ham back when I was eating meat, and the other sandwich toppings weren't to my taste either, but that didn't worry me, as I love rice porridge. I stopped at seconds. However, when the evening was over I noticed that there was a large pot of porridge left over, so I borrowed a large soup bowl from the hall and took home some porridge. Then I went past a grocery store and bought a small thing of cream, and this morning I whipped the cream and blended it with the porridge to make risalamalta, or as I like to call it, the food of the gods. (This is good, as this means that I have only a relatively small amount of it in the house. If I had decided to make some myself, I would have made a large batch of porridge, and thus would have made a large batch of risalamalta, and I don't need to be eating lots of it, and with no one in the house to help me with it...

On every table when we sat down there were several copies of a booklet of Christmas songs (all in Swedish, but some are translations of ones that were first written in English). We sang several before eating a few more after eating the first bit, but before going back for seconds, sang even more after eating seconds and before the games begun, and yet more between the rounds of the games.

After everyone had had a chance to finish eating they turned on the overhead lights again, and divided us up into teams of three (we had no choice as to who would be in our team). Then we played games in rounds--the first round they gave us a piece of paper and asked up to provide the names of 21 different birds based on the word-play clues they provided. My team was the only team of four, the above mentioned 12 year old, his mom, and one of the musicians. Luckily both the mom and the musician was good at bird names, as neither the 12 year old or I were able to help at all with that one.

The next round the paper had a list of a bunch of English phrases, and a bunch of Korean phrases, and we were to match them up. The Korean phrases were all things that if read out loud would sound like an English phrase, so it was pretty easy to match them up with the actual English phrase with a similar meaning. The 12 year old wandered off for this one, too, but the other three of us kept grabbing the pencil and writing down answers--we were all three quite fast at it, and we all were looking at different phrases, so we were the first group done with that part, but I did go through and check all of our work to be certain we got them all before turning it in.

The final round was a musical crossword. They provided a blank crossword puzzle, then they would ask out loud a question and then sing a tune, and we needed to write down the answer from the song, which meant needing to be able to recognise the song, and know the lyrics well enough to answer the question. Needless to say, I wasn't able to help with that one, either. My teammates were able to fill in answers for most of them though, and every group in the room filled in enough of the answers that we were all able to shout in unison when asked that the phrase in the pink highlighted row (formed by alignment of the other words, which were all on a Christmas theme) was gott nytt år

After the games and coffee and desert (which was served between rounds) we packed up the tables, turned off the overhead lights again, and the musicians started playing Swedish folk music. I danced, of course, every dance. They stopped playing a bit after 21:00 and we packed up and went home. I was ok with that, as it gave me a chance to swing by the closest store to the house before they closed at 22:00 to get that cream I mentioned above.

All in all a lovely evening. I remember a time when my only social outlet was the SCA (which is still my primary social outlet), but one of the best things about living in Luleå is that there are other groups which fill a similar niche as the SCA in my life--providing me an opportunity to do crafts, sing, and dance, with good friends (we even wear costumes, but not yesterday).

As a bonus, here is an entry for my long-neglected "Learn Swedish One Song at a Time" series. One of the songs we sang last night was:

Jag såg mamma kyssa tomten


Jag såg mamma kyssa tomten ja
Tänk om våran pappa kommit då

Jag hade gömt mig i en vrå, för att titta lite på
Ett konstigt stort paket som någon av oss skulle få
Och då fick tomten mammas klapp och kyss,
sedan sa hon "Å vad du är bra
nej ingen ser att det är du",
men jag såg att det var
tomten mamma kysste igår kväll

Which literally translates to:

I saw mommy kiss Santa, yes
Think if our daddy had come then

I had hidden myself in a corner, to look a little at
a strange large packet which one of us would get
and then Santa received mommy's touch and kiss,
after which she said "Oh you are good
no, no one can see that it is you"
but I saw that it was
Santa that mommy kissed yesterday evening

I have mentioned before that we are making svartvinbärsylt(black currant jam) by boiling berries with an apple, but no sugar, and how much I love it as a condiment on foods (much like Americans use ketchup). Recently lord_kjar's parents moved house, and when they did they gave us one of their freezers, and with it a few bags of lingonberries. Swedes tend to put lingonberry jam on pretty much all food types, but I don't care for it, because store bought jam has so much sugar in it. However, lingonberries are much tarter than black currants, so we decided to try mixing the two berries 50-50. Today's jam consisted of 1 yoghurt bucket of black currants, 1 yogurt bucket of lingonberries, and one small green apple (and no sugar, of course), which I covered with water and boiled till it had condensed down small enough that it fits into two 3/4 L glass jars, with a bit of room to spare in each.

While it was cooking I took last night's rotmos(mashed potatoes + other root vegetables, like turnip, parsnip, rutabaga, and carrot) and turned it into perogies and baked some bread rolls. I just tried some of the perogies with the lingon-svartvinbärsylt on it, and yum! The jam is just tart enough to bite back when eaten on its own, but blends very well with savory foods.

The reason I managed to do all of this is that this morning I will need to work in the afternoon. The department is having a party during which various labs have been asked to do a short presentation of what they do, and I was specifically asked to do a talk on the new laser ablation ICP-MS lab. Since the party starts at 15:30, I am not going to go in till just a bit before then.

This weekend's Spelmansstamän was, as always, ever so much fun. Our dance performance went well, his nyckleharpa group performance sounded great, there were many other wonderful performers, and, as always, the evening dancing was fabulous. Groups of musicians take turns playing for the dancers all evening both Friday and Saturday nights. This was my fifth Spelmansstamän, and I am pleased to report that these days I don't even need to think about what kind of music they are playing, my body just does the correct type of Swedish folk dance to the music.

Then C arrived for a visit yesterday, and it is so wonderful to have her here again. It is looking like either she will come north (usually) or we will head south to see her at least once a month for the rest of the year.

Last weekend was one of those "full-on" weekends that keep one too busy to even look at a computer, let alone check in with the world.

Friday, walking home from work with lord_kjar, he asked me what I planned to wear the next day at our Folk Dance performance. This is when I realized that I really should have made arrangements to borrow a skirt. Oops. However, this performance wasn't one of the major performances of our group, where we all wear the same matching costume with the skirt of hand-woven fabric patterned after one from the Luleå area in the 1800's (as seen in this costume I borrowed for last year's performances). Therefore, rather than doing last minute scrambling we looked into our fabric stash to see what we had that might work.

Some of the other ladies in the folk dance guild have plain grey wool skirts (in addition to, or instead of, the striped skirt in the above link). Therefore, of all of the wool we had in the house, the one that seemed best suited to making such a skirt was the heavy grey wool twill we picked up at Double Wars (which we had thought would make either some nice Viking trousers or perhaps a heavy tunic).

Friday night was also a visit from lord_kjar's eldest brother, his wife, and three young daughters. They have come up from southern Sweden for a visit to their parents in Piteå (about 45 minutes south of here), and since they were this close then had to come see us, too. So before we looked at fabric, and before the guests arrived, we mixed up a banana-nut bread and got it into the oven, and then started some cookie dough. (However, since the bread took a full hour to bake, we ran out of time, and just put the cookie dough into the fridge to bake later.)

We had a fun time visiting with his family that evening, and they didn't think it at all odd that after enjoying the banana-nut bread with them I got out fabric and started pleating it to a waist band. I made a couple of attempts at folding the fabric into even sized pleats using the twill stripes of the fabric as a guide, but soon gave up at trying to figure out which number of stripes would reduce two full widths of fabric to the size of my waist. Instead I took a sturdy linen thread, ran it through the edge of the fabric, and pulled to draw it in to the size of the waist band.

Once it was the correct length I pinned the waistband into place, and lord_kjar stitched it down (this was just after his brother and company went back to their parent's house for the night). After the first side of the waist band was sewn down we realized that I had pinned it on such that if he sewed the second side with a machine it would show through to the outside, so I started sewing the second side of the waist band by hand, and he did the first pass of attaching a narrow woven band to the hem of the skirt. That band was then folded to the inside, and the far side of it hand-stitched down to keep the raw edge of the wool sealed, but not do a full rolled hem in fabric that thick.

The hand sewing on the waist took as long to do as the machine sewing of the hem, plus about 1/4 of the hand sewing of the hem. Once I got the waist done I joined him on the hand sewing of the hem, and we managed to finish the job by midnight. There is a photo of it over here

Saturday we got up nice and early, and went down to Piteå, where we spent all day at a fair. We did a few dance demos for the public, hung out near the Folk Federation's booth (and costume display), and even wandered a bit to see some of the other displays. Toward's the end of the day lord_kjar finally got out his violin, which he had been carrying all day, and joined his fellow musicians in playing some tunes. When one of the other musicians took a break from playing I talked him into dancing with me, which was quite fun.

From there we went over to his parent's house (about a 5 minute drive from the fair grounds) to join the family for dinner. In addition to the eldest brother and his family visiting from down south, the youngest brother (who lives only another hour south of their parents) and his wife were there, so it was quite the party. It is probably a good thing that I didn't discover that the strawberries in the garden were ripe until after dinner. It would have been a shame to have missed out on all that good food just because I was too full of strawberries to eat any more. Ok, I admit it, even though I was quite full of berries already, when they brought out the cake covered with whipped cream and more strawberries, I did take a small piece. Yum!

Sunday morning we got up bright and early to drive down to Umeå (another 2.5 hours south of Piteå), where we helped our friend L with some of her packing, and loaded up our car with parts of her collection of fabric, yarn, scrap leather, and fur. The deal is that we will store it for her while she is in France for her PhD, and she can have back later whatever we don't use in the mean time. We are also borrowing/storing her bicycle. (This is a good thing--his last bike was stolen some time before I met him, and he has been doing without. But now that his work has moved to a new office only a 15 minute walk from home, it is good to have a bike to ride to work.)

In addition to helping her pack we also got to meet her mother, who was up visiting from Southern Sweden to help with packing and to take some of her other stuff home to store for her there. The four of us went for a long walk in the forest near her house, and ate wild blueberries. Yum!

We had so much fun visiting that we didn't get in the car for the drive home till 23:00, which meant we didn't get home till about 03:00. Gee, Monday morning sure felt early when that alarm went off. Despite the tired start to the work week, I have still managed to accomplish a fair bit, and it is only Wednesday. One task I have completed, a full week before the deadline to turn it in, is a talk about my research, to be presented at the Department's "Kick-off Retreat" later this month.

So, that was this past weekend's travel. Next weekend, on the other hand, is not going to have the travel we had expected. Due to delays in getting the paperwork we needed a group of us from work will not be going to Russia next week after all. However, lord_kjar will be traveling. His work has been talking of sending him away to a training session "somewhere" in Europe the last week of August. However, at the last minute, they decided this week that instead of the last week in August it should be next week. Therefore he is flying to Scotland on Sunday and will return the following Friday. With luck he will get to meet up with sismith42 and loupblanc while he is there. He may also get to see clovis_t. If he does he will pick up the cloak I started for clovis_t years ago--a heavy blue wool that doesn't fray, to which I was tablet weaving on a very thin (two cards, two threads each) border. It would be nice to get that project back and finish it up. Not that I will touch it till I finish up my my own sexy cloak in progress.

(I don't recall if I have posted about that cloak here yet. The main fabric is a blue/grey wool twill, lightly felted. It is fully lined with a much lighter black wool twill, and the tablet woven band is bein attached such thar it shows on both sides, with the raw edges of the fabric turn to the inside. There will be a couple more rows of blue running stitch along the edge to hold it all together. Once I get the edge finished (I am getting there--two of the four sides are done, and the trim is attached to the blue on the other two sides, so only the black and the running embroidery stitching left to do) I will applique decoration to the central bit, and then I will be able to take out the basting stitches that hold the fabric together.

(Note: I found out the hard way that one really does have to baste the fabric together and sew each fabric layer to the trim one at a time (not counting the first seam--that one can be stitched through all three layers at once, inside out). If one tries to sew the whole thing inside out the two layers of fabric don't stretch the same amount, and when one turns them right side out again they don't lay smoothly. Learn from my mistakes!)

Since I am not going anywhere this weekend, I said yes to a couch surfing request. I couldn't resist, actually, the couple is from Slovakia and they are musicians traveling around Scandinavia playing music on street corners.

Today we went out to the lovely summer house of our folk dance teacher, and while there helped her upload to FB the photos from her camera from our dance performance at Spelmansstämma the weekend before Midsummer. My favourite is the one of me (and some of the other girls "flying":


I don't really have anything else to add just now, but some of you had asked to see photos of the dancing...