There’s been a shortage of posts this year, mainly because my hands have been full of yarn. The epic quest to embroider my own Norwegian bunad continues, but I’m discovering that embroidery takes a long time. The skirt on my new Valdresbunad is three meters wide, and it takes about an hour to embroider an area the size of my thumbnail. The photo below (from November) shows the embroidered skirt hem at about 40 percent. Above, a few months later.

My life has been a bit restricted lately, just like everyone else’s, but in March I attended the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando, my first public event since the pandemic began. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed seeing colleagues and connecting with other writers. My colleague Farah Mendlesohn was the scholarly guest of honor, and author Nisi Shawl gave the opening address. Members of the Ephemeral Mythical Collective from Oslo combined textiles, choreography, and storytelling in their treatment of Greek myth. My friend Simone Carroti gave a brilliant paper on Tolkien’s children’s story Roverandom. It was all so much fun! I attended poetry and fiction readings, plus panels on Tolkien and Octavia Butler and African Futurism and folklore and game design. As always, I searched unsuccessfully for the conference hotel’s elusive alligator, and I swam in the alligator-free pool.

I was definitely in the minority, but I simply couldn’t deal with being unmasked or eating in public. But I wore an epic dress to the awards banquet anyway, and I ducked outdoors at intervals to sip wine and snack on petit fours.

After I returned from Florida, I actually ventured into public a second time, to see the dreamy multimedia Van Gogh Experience. It felt good to be out in the world again.

Besides embroidering for an hour a day and working on my written bunad project, I’ve also been playing music. Specifically, I’ve been fiddling around. More about that in a future post!