Cimorene

Last time I updated about my learning to drive stick/standard shift I posted this, you may remember:

Total cost:

Application fee: 25€
Driving lessons: 875€
ADHD tax: 152€

Incorrect. That was my total cost thus far, but I forgot the fees for the theory test and the driving test! I have now reserved a time for the theory test on August 14.

Theory test fee: 40€
Driving test fee (not booked yet): 99€

Total: 1191€

I'll have to take the bus to Turku to take it at the nearest Ajovarma office. ( Read more... ) I have been studying the badly-translated textbook that came with my driving class (and also the good Swedish translation and occasionally the Finnish original, for clarity) and going through the test practice questions. I passed the first full practice test I took yesterday, but at about 70%, so I'm trying to make it so I know the answers to all the questions.

Friday I had a second lesson with the driving simulator, and it was much better than the first one. It was fun actually! But I completely failed to manage to start the car on a hill again (I failed to do this in my first simulator lesson like 8 times in a row and the teacher, after coaching me through the steps and explaining it, just gave up and reset the lesson lol) and had to reset it. Now I've read in the textbook I realize it's because the hill in the simulator was too steep for the instructions he gave me the first time (on a gentle slope you only need the brake, but on a steep hill you need the parking brake as well - terrifying).

BONUS OFF-TOPIC FUN FACTS: READING AND BANNING

1. After we watched the season finale of the Murderbot show, and I discussed it extensively with both my sister (who is extremely ALL CHANGE IS BAD CHANGE) and waxjism (who is not, but was annoyed because the show felt too YA for her, although she didn't HATE it), I reread the books. I had reread All Systems Red before the show; last week I reread it again, then all the others, and then I read the newest short story, Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy (about ART and its crew). And after that for days I just wanted MORE and didn't want to read anything else, but the next novel isn't out yet; I reread Artificial Condition again and started Network Effect again, and skimmed through the tags on AO3 and Tumblr to see what people are saying... but it wasn't really satisfying. When I'm interested in a ship that is non-sexual in nature, I rarely find what I want from fandom, and that's what happened again (though there is some gen friendship fic and some queerplatonic fic on AO3). I can't begrudge people their desire to sexualize nonsexual relationships, because I've definitely thought that was fun before. I wrote Finding Nemo slash (and I stand by that). But when you don't want to read that, and I don't, your odds are simply worse, because there's less of it.
   
   Unlike my sister, I didn't hate the show, but I was even more annoyed by what Wax called "YA" writing choices than she was. I'm not sure if she can stand to watch it with me when the next season comes out, because I find it very hard to shut up when I'm annoyed at tv. I am happy with the casting and have no problem with the acting - all the things that I disliked are what I consider objectively bad adaptation and writing choices. But it was still fun and watchable when considered as its own work in isolation from the books! Just weirdly and unnecessarily YA in tone.



2. For fans of banning/blocking, the action, you'll be pleased that I banned someone from my design blog designobjectory last week! I like all ages and periods of decorative arts, but my blog contains a lot of my special interests - midcentury modern, Bauhaus, Art Deco and Art Nouveau, and Swedish and Finnish design (mostly 20th c). Somebody reblogged one of my MANY posts of Finnish midcentury light fixtures by Finnish lighting titan Lisa Johansson Pape (one of the many times I've posted a variant of her 44 cm. diameter metal pendant lamp shade, which is still in production by Innolux)... anyway, somebody reblogged it with a comment sort of like "This is the ONE Scandinavian modern thing I like lol. I hate light birch furniture!" My blog is extremely heavy on light wood because of my strong interest in Swedish and Finnish 20th century design! So I blocked them. First I asked Wax if that was too unreasonable and she laughed a lot and said that it's never unreasonable to block people on your own blog. Maybe a little weird though. I mean, probably. But it's so thrilling and satisfying to block someone.



3. Ever since DW made it so you can type @ + username to create the little username embed (waxjism), I have completely switched to it and whenever I want to use the version that links to another site I forget what the code is and end up having to google it. I mean, to search the DW faqs. This is the third time it's happened. That's because it's user name, with a space between. I always forget that.

YouTube showed me a video called Bauhaus Women about the female artists and designers associated with the Bauhaus school and movement in 1930s Germany.

I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was to learn that basically every famous male name associated with it was kinda a piece of shit. If this documentary is correct (I'm thinking I'll have to buy at least one book about this now) then:

Paul Klee and Wasily Kandinsky both believed that women couldn't do fine art, only crafts, because they don't have the "creative genius" required, and they didn't want to teach them art. (Possibly their fragility was encouraged by the success of female art students in the first year, including Jewish polymath Friedl Dicker, who was later killed at Auschwitz.) (Yeah, it was the 30s, other artists thought this, but not even all the followers of the official Academy styles thought that anymore at this point. So it's even more embarrassing.)

Walter Gropius (founder, boss, ground-breaking architect) initially had very utopian ideals and threw open student recruitment emphasizing gender equality, but after they got more female than male students to begin with, he got SGA/Supernatural syndrome, or at least worried that his and the school's funding and reputation would suffer if they were seen as too female, and made new rules limiting female students to the study of weaving only and announcing that female brains couldn't think in 3D and were not suited for architecture and design. This didn't stop him from making exceptions for female designers whose work was bringing money and media attention to the school.

The lone female professor (of weaving), Gunta Stölzl, was only hired after agitation and campaigning by the students, even though she was running the weaving workshop and for years had been responsible for it bringing in more money than any other department. She still was never given benefits or a permanent contract.

Many of the most commercially successful designers were women (Marianne Brandt, Alma Siedhoff-Buscher) and were pushed out once they married or had children.

All the most famous photographs of the school and in the contemporary catalogs were taken by Lucia Moholy, wife of professor László Moholy-Nagy, for free apparently, and when she had to flee the country due to being Jewish many of her negatives were left behind. She then spent decades battling Gropius for her copyright.

Now, these stories are, after all, not that shocking for the 1930s and university settings. But the Bauhaus was set apart, from its conception and all its self-advertisement as a representative of the progressive wave of modernity, besides explicitly recruiting women with promises that were later walked back. It was full of free love, just not freedom to study architecture and metalwork (Marianne Brandt was given an exemption to do that).

I was struck when watching this by the comparison with William Morris's Arts and Crafts movement. As discussed in this post, there were many ideological similarities between the Arts and Crafts movement and the Bauhaus movement, and historical ones too, ie that the designers' ideas about the democratization of art and design, designing beautiful and functional objects for the homes of ordinary people, were ironically lost very quickly, with fashion and manufacturing costs leading them to end up making trendy fashionable overpriced objects for the bourgeois instead, even though in the case of Bauhaus the other big element of the ideology is industrial design. This happened even though they were mass-produced!

William Morris's daughter May was a major designer for Morris & Co in the Victorian/Edwardian era, and she was not the only prolific woman designer employed there before the foundation of the Bauhaus. I have not read much on the history of the company, but at first glance it looks like female artist representation is at least slightly better in the Arts & Crafts movement than in the Bauhaus, and that's. Well.

I do not yet have time to replace all my Klee and Kandinsky etc icons with icons of the work of female avant garde artists, but I am feeling the impulse.

I was asked to talk some more about wallpaper, and I love to talk about wallpaper!

I grew up prejudiced against wallpaper, because ( Read more... )

But when we bought our 1950 wooden house in 2019 and dove into researching it we learned that wallpaper was the most common, expected wall treatment for it. I wasn't even willing to consider moving in without changing the wall surface treatments of every single room in the house, on initial walkthrough. (waxjism agreed that things were mostly ugly, but she would totally have been willing to live with some of it for a while, and some of it forever, and my mother-in-law didn't see anything wrong with some of the wallpapers, but was just ¯_(ツ)_/¯ about my aesthetic preferences.) When we bought the house, the existing wallpapers and wall treatments were as follows: ( Read more... ).

The downstairs walls of our house are actually made out of stretched cardboard, a common and inexpensive wall material at that time that was sold on giant rolls, soaked to soften it, then stretched out evenly in all directions and nailed to the framing timbers on all four sides. This construction method was designed to be wallpapered over. We learned that we could also paint the walls as long as the paint wasn't a vapor barrier (no plastic content: traditional oil paints or distemper, tempera, or mineral paints), and we were very attached to my idee fixe that paint is cheaper and better than wallpaper; so we actually did this. We regret it! Wallpaper was the style- and period-appropriate choice and the better choice for our wall type, more forgiving of errors. The distemper-painted walls in our dining room look fine, but distemper is vulnerable to physical wear. The 0-VOC linseed-based eco paint we used in the living room took me like two weeks and like six coats because we chose a medium green and it wasn't opaque in any less. This paint also takes a long time to cure to full hardness, and as a result has various dings in it. We could've papered this room in a similar shade of solid green paper for about a third the cost and a tenth the effort, but again... we were not wise yet.

A primary consideration for us was choosing period-appropriate wallpaper and curtains that would fit the architecture and feel of the house.

Kitchen.
waxjism and I have both posted before about how we later spotted our kitchen wallpaper, by the Swedish Boråstapeter, in The Queen's Gambit (I know now that they filmed it in Europe in order to work with my idol, German production designer Uli Hanisch, so it makes a lot more sense to find the paper there...). (Illustrative screencap in an old post of Wax's here; product page here.) We fell in love with this paper when we saw a sample in a rack by the door at a wallpaper shop in Turku, actually, but we had already bought the backsplash tiles you can see here behind Sipuli from a local guy on Finland's equivalent of Craigslist (tori.fi).( Read more... )

Curved entryway wall.
There's a picture of this up above in its current wallpaper, Sanderson Hampton Trellis. (A couple more are available in this old post about my beloved rainbow ball coatrack.) I fell for this kelly-green paper with its large-scale white geometric trellis print early in house research and so did waxjism. We knew immediately that we needed a bold contrast treatment for this curved feature wall, but we didn't decide on this paper immediately because it's by far the most expensive wallpaper we bought for the house. I spent like a year looking for an alternative that we liked even slightly as much that cost less, and we could never find one that we could be happy with. You had to visualize the size of the curved wall and its place in the room, and it needed to be a bold pattern of a certain scale with a strong contrast in it, and it turned out that most of the alternatives I could find weren't available in bold enough colors or in the right scale. It isn't 1950s, but there was a trend of chinoiserie (of which this sort of trellis wallpaper is an outgrowth) and also a trend of trellis wallpapers specifically during the 1960s (and the bathroom itself, and hence the curved wall, were added to the house around 1960 - our house and all its DIY clones from the same plans are designed to be built in stages, initially without plumbing, with bathrooms and kitchen sinks etc added later when the family could afford it). This doesn't really look quite like the 60s ones I've seen, but the connection is enough to satisfy me. The kelly green harmonizes nicely with the muted blue-green shades that dominate in the kitchen. I liked a few Pihlgren & Ritola alternatives that all weren't quite right for some reason, like Snowflake (black and white is bold but we prefer colorful!) and Pinecone (same, but mainly the scale was just too small... I really love this print and I love foresty wallpapers), Pro Finlandia (the scale is bold but the color contrast isn't! 1970s art nouveau revival vibes, a little late for us but still in the window of possibility), Paradise (60s-70s folklore/primitivism, nice bold colors and large scale, but as you see in the wall shots, the lozenges tile together into a rather even print even in the really bright colors? And we weren't SUPER into any of the color combinations.)

Living room.
As mentioned above, I painted this room a medium green with an oil-based ecological paint, chosen over distemper because the final surface can be washed with soap and water or scrubbed. We love a medium green! We love this shade! ( Read more... ) For these reasons we will not be repapering this room until after both of our bunnies have died, so it will probably be a few years, but I have looked repeatedly:( Read more... )

Dining room.
The dining room is currently distempered with a beautiful light bluey aqua, really on the edge of off white, but it's got holes ripped in it by Anubis and spots worn out from my shoulders when sitting up in bed. We can't paint and wallpaper that room (it has a huge built-in cabinet and three small closet doors that need to be repainted in our trim color as well) until Cat Divorce is over, but we have looked and looked at wallpapers. ( Read more... )

Powder room.
The downstairs bathroom, or half-bath, or powder room, or WC, the one that was put in about 1960 and fully renovated before we moved in, contains the washing machine as well as sink and toilet, and because it doesn't have a shower, we didn't have to tile all the way up the walls. The wall covering should still be basically water-resistant in case of splashing of course, and there's all that construction waterproofing under the finish so the normal considerations about non-plastic wallcoverings in an old wood house no longer apply. We started with the floor tiles, which are a dark cobalt blue with a lot of color variation, again, leftovers from some local guy on Finnish Craigslist, and we got enough of them to do both our bathrooms. The upstairs is a little shower room, so the walls are tiled all the way up to the ceiling, and we chose white, so I thought the downstairs should have dark walls that blend into the floor to differentiate it. What I really wanted was this underwater wallpaper with swimming koi carp, Derwent by Osborne & Little, or Cole & Son's Acquario which has puffer fish, but I didn't consider them because of price. I was also into similar designs of blue sky dotted with birds like Daydream by Julia Rothman for Hygge & West. In the end we painted with a color matched from the tiles and then I did this undersea mural with white Posca markers and a spray-on acrylic waterproofing coat (there's a picture of it here - maybe I've never posted 360 photos of it).

Landing.
The landing is mostly painted a light sea green, but there is an alcove with this single roll of Pihlgren & Ritola Atom in a discontinued groovy lime green (here). The wall opposite the alcove is still the off-white of the stairwell panels, which we will repaint eventually I guess, but they will still be white. This wallpaper is also inside on the back wall of the wardrobe Wax built. The rest of the library is made of wood fiber panels with a finger gap, which makes it unsuitable for wallpaper. It is painted a very bright light aqua with mineral paint. We love this color, which is an outlier in terms of our palette, but the room always feels very light and bright.

Bedroom.
The bedroom was wallpapered before, and we stripped it, put up a layer of paintable brown paper and painted that with a sort of light khaki green clay paint. Love it! But in retrospect I think I would paper the room in a floral paper in a similar shade of green like Duro Vilhelmina or Boråstapeter Borosan 21 8618. Or if price were no object, Lim & Handtryck's Tjolöholm Slott.

Yesterday I dropped by one of the little local boutiques that sell house stuff and I got a chip basket for the firewood! Also some adorable handmade candles! I was in luck, because it was the only one she had and it was a bit old and scuffed - she had it out full of blankets for sale - so she gave me a slight discount. And the store was really nice and cozy inside. I'd never been in before, because these sorts of little stores are mostly only open on weekdays, and occasionally a few hours on a weekend. I learned some new interior décor terms in Swedish and saw a near-clone of our cast iron stove, the same shape, but hers is all enamelled white. It was lit, and the door was open! The store is the whole downstairs of a cute wooden early 20th c. house (maybe a bit earlier: I'm just guessing, without a detailed inspection). Big plank floors everywhere and piles of blankets and wool rugs, cast iron hooks and enamel door signs and crystal and china and big piles of baskets and of course, Morris wallpaper, which I still can't buy because it's expensive and the wrong period and I have nowhere to use it, but it's even more tempting when you're touching it.

But also yesterday, my work computer tried to update itself and plunged into an endless cycle of reboots, as some other people have described it. The update doesn't install correctly, and it demands that you restart, and then it says it has installed and wants you to restart, but then when you do it isn't installed. After a bunch of restarts and being unplugged and multiple attempts to simply uninstall the broken update (that doesn't work either), I concluded that you probably either need to do a clean install or go in with admin privileges and delete some sensitive bits manually. I did find some Google results that point to this type of solution, and logic tells me this is how you'd fix an issue of this type in Linux, but I don't know enough about Windows to do that to my work computer without a lot more confidence in how to restore from backups. So I called the local computer company that belongs to one of waxjism's second or third cousins (a descendant of a sibling of her granny who was one of nine) and they're sending a guy Thursday afternoon. The internet still works and my work laptop and the printer are all fine, but the work laptop is without a power cable, and all my attempts to email the groups who might have accidentally taken the power cable have so far come to naught. So I've gotta try to save the laptop's power a bit. It's at 56% now because I had to do some Photoshopping today, not just answering emails.

It wasn't supposed to rain today, but it's raining. I wondered why I saw so many people in raincoats on my way to work!

Wax and I both tend to kind of ignore presents, for the most part. We share the quality of being able to buy most of the stuff we actually want, which tends to be like things for our hobbies. We also don't attach much sentimentality to them, I guess.

(I like getting presents that are surprises, but not enough to care that much, and also I'm hard to pick things out for, so my sister - the person I talk to about my hobbies and interests the most, because she shares most of them - is the only person who's very well equipped to give me that kind of present, something you like or want enough to be pleased with but not enough to have got it yourself even though it is related to your hobby.)

I'm thinking about this because in Finland, birthdays that are a multiple of 10 are a big deal. My MIL, who was both sweet and thoughtful AND good at organizing and planning, always gave slightly fancier presents for them - in fact she gave me one of my favorite necklaces when I turned 25 and one when I turned 30. The one I got when I turned 35 was even better because it was an heirloom. But on our own, Wax and I tend to consider birthdays just another day. My SIL is just a couple of weeks younger than me, so we've always both just had a birthday when we have a Christmas reunion, and she asked me if Wax got me anything special this time and was a bit shocked that I said no. She asked for a kayak and got one. There's a good spot for it near their house, and they've already been multiple times with rented ones. That's adorable!

This year at Christmas Wax and I bought ourselves:

1. Wax and I get more enjoyment miles, or minutes as it were, out of pajamas than anything else, and we decided a few years ago to get them for each Christmas. But we didn't want to wait to open them at Christmas, so we didn't. (We got two different colors of what we agree is the perfect nightdress: Ristomatti Ratia Adina. )

2. I spent about 75€ on fountain pen stuff (a nice sturdy Twsbi Eco that I could take to work worrying able damaging it, like with my beloved Pelikans which have softer, springy nibs, and a glass dip pen, but I chipped the tip right away), and ordered about the same amount of cake baking stuff for Wax (a mousse ring and a set of piping tips and the plastic reusable foil that you use to line the mousse ring when making mousse cake, all from the delightful posh kitchen store whose invoices tragically DON'T look like wedding invitations anymore, but they sent us a free spongecloth in the last one). But obviously we didn't wrap those things.

3. I was saying we should get something we could stand to wait and open at Christmas, and I happily remembered our Rörstrand Mon Amie mugs - we had two, so I bought us two more, and then when they arrived I reminded Wax that the reason I ordered them was to have something to open on Christmas Eve but she looked at me like that was ridiculous, which, like, it was, so we just used them right away.

4. I also bought the hilariously minimalist Swedish midmod design candleholder Stumpastaken, which holds 9 tealights by default so I've been coveting one to use as a menorah for years. I laugh whenever I look at it - it reminds me of the Bauhaus nativity. For Hanukka, obviously, not birthday or Christmas.

5. Last fall we discussed me ordering a KitchenAid mixer after my first few paychecks, but I kinda rethought it. We have a Kenwood which is, yes, inferior. It's lighter, the body is plastic that's already yellowing, and it's got places you can't clean bread dough out of without taking it apart. It's got attachments that are not stainless or enameled so they can't be washed in the dishwasher. But we use it comparatively little. Wax has gotten really into making cakes and she bakes much more than me these days, but usually with the hand mixer. Since all the Korean and Japanese pastry chefs on YouTube that we follow primarily use hand mixers too, I now feel that this is a legitimate choice. Also if we got one we'd probably have to drive to Turku just to donate the Kenwood.

And I don't really want any more expensive fountain pens right now! I've found my ideal pen in the Pelikan 200/400 series, and I like them so much that I don't want any more pens that aren't piston-fillers, except the Twsbi (for its sturdy hard nib that I'm not afraid of damaging) and a handful of Kaweco Sports, which not only have hard nibs but which I prefer to load with cartridges because they're so small. They're handy to have in the pocket, but I don't want a whole collection of them; if you have a pen inked up and don't use it for a few weeks it'll dry up, which is bad for them.

I would like an endless collection of sweaters, but there's a limit to how fast we can knit, so buying more wool in advance would be silly.

I realized yesterday that Wax's reaction when I bring her tea without asking first if she wanted tea is similar to the "Yes... ha ha ha yes!" meme.



This is an apposite time to note that for her birthday 12 days ago I got her a new teacup though. The tall mug is part of a recent reissue of Marianne Westman's iconic Swedish midcentury "Mon Amie" service for Rörstrand.



We have a set of teacups inherited from one of Wax's grandmothers, but they're dainty and delicate ones like this:


Mon Amie doesn't really go with our primary dishes, Iittala Teema in turquoise, but we both love it way more than the mug and bowl alternatives (Teema doesn't include serving bowls and the mugs are too small for daily use). We have a handful of red and blue Taika mugs like in the cartoon up there inherited from Wax's mom (the white one is ours), but they don't satisfy my wishes for dish-matching either and I plan to eventually get around to selling them on the Finnish equivalent of Craigslist. (They are the right size, though.)

Some of you may remember that when I quite recently got it into my head to make modern art icons, a few of my topics were Matisse's cut paper collages, the paintings of Hilma af Klint, and paintings by the art instructors from the Bauhaus.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, I discovered first that Ikea's current assortment includes several large Af Klint posters, and then that H&M Home is currently selling both Bauhaus posters and Matisse cutouts posters. For a second I was weirded out at the apparently staggering coincidence, but then I remembered...

...I got all three of these interests, originally, when I was browsing designs on Redbubble that are popular in the "Art" and "Art history" tags. (I got a bunch of stickers and then some cloth masks last fall.) This made me feel a bit silly.

But the question remains: where did they get it? I mean, I don't think Ikea and H&M got these trends from Redbubble, so I assume they represent trends in - poster art, or something like that, more broadly. Interior design perhaps? But what I don't know is what kinds of primary sources or whatever the Redbubble sellers have been plugged into that have informed them of this. I mean, and also the Ikea and H&M designers. Maybe there's a place somewhere where people are upvoting and downvoting vintage posters??? Maybe it's an obscure corner of Instagram. Maybe it's a social networking site I haven't heard of. I'm really curious now.

I posted a couple of weeks ago in enthusiastic praise of Soldier of the Mist. As soon as I finished it I read the sequel, Soldier of Arete. My dad said it was "Really good, but not as good as Soldier of the Mist" at the time, and I suppose I can endorse that, although it's only a little less great than the first book. It's a continuation of it, and in some ways perhaps feels like it has less action, or just less sweeping action, and like less mysterious and political things are happening? But I still didn't want to put it down, but drew it out a little because I didn't want to be finished with it.

In fact, Wolfe wrote a third book called Soldier of Sidon some twenty years after the first two, and I have it, but I didn't want to read it right away, in case it was disappointing in comparison. And it's probably appropriate to pause a bit, since he did, anyway.

However, then I had the problem that I couldn't really decide what else from my lengthy to-read list I felt like reading, because I didn't really want to read anything else. "More of this, or as close to it as possible" probably covers it. Actually I started reading a mystery set in ancient Rome, and it is more similar than most of the things high on my to-read list... but it still didn't exactly hit the spot, and I have been rereading fanfiction from my bookmarks instead.

And also, as I mentioned in my last post, I spent half a week or so reading back through the blog Retro Renovation (and then I ordered a book on the history of Finnish architectural style by the same author as our amazing Rintamamiestalo book... it's very exciting, but I anticipate it won't have the level of detail I want. What I really want is access to a massive trove of vintage Finnish advertisements and catalogs relating to home building and furnishings, and I suspect I might not even be able to find that at the library without going into Turku).

The name for the material that makes mid-20th-c. Murano glass lights/lamps look so incredibly biteable and candylike is cased glass.

1. Modern midcentury-style Italian mouthblown pendant lamp by the Murano masters at Millefiori
2. A vintage Yugoslavian blown glass pendant lamp
3. Vintage Italian pendant lamps by Venini

All the images were posted recently at my decorative arts Tumblr designobjectory under the tag lighting.

The effect is caused by a colored layer of glass fused over an opaline/milk glass white layer; cased glass is any combination of two or more differently-colored layers, often with the opaque white on the outside or all the layers colored, and often with the outer layer etched or cut away to create a design. Cutaway and etched cased glass effects apparently go back to ancient times. The most familiar examples to many, however, will be 19th century antiques, particularly the then-wildly-popular Bohemian art glass (often further embellished with gold leaf and other painted-on designs), as seen in the ornate red and white objects in the top rows of images here and our heirloom Bohemian cranberry glass candy bowl here:



I haven't found a specific term for the color-over-milk cased glass that produces this luscious candy effect, but it was a very popular technique in the midcentury, not only in Murano glass, obviously. You can see a lot of Empoli (art glass center near Florence) cased glass from the period in luscious rows here.

When Wax's mom died we inherited her sofa, which she had recently bought second hand but in mint condition from one of her posh relations. This sofa is a solidly-built piece of construction with the frame made of massive pieces of solid wood here in Finland, custom upholstered in multiple beautiful tapestry fabrics that were coincidentally in MIL's favorite color (eggplant purple). It was waiting over here on our side of the house with lots of other big bits of furniture while the renovations were ongoing, because it was too big to fit into the other side while our furniture was all crammed into two rooms there. And while it was here, the BB escaped over to this side a few times and acquired the hobby of climbing up it to perch on the top (it was lying on its side to save space, so it made a very tall perch)... and shred the upholstery. Before we noticed this and had any way to put a stop to it, she had already destroyed the upholstery on the front of the arms to the point that the only way to save it would have been having it professionally reupholstered.



So when we moved over to this side, we started using it, although of course we knew it had to be replaced. It's a little too large for the room anyway, I suppose. But meanwhile it's quite comfortable, and since the upholstery was a lost cause we left it alone. By the time Tristana joined the household the fabric was completely gone on the fronts of the armrests, and she loved to play with it so much that she quickly started pulling out bits of polyfill. We caught her trying to eat a bit of the polyfill recently so we carefully wrapped some furniture covers around both ends of the sofa to forestall her... but instead she determined that the furniture covers are an amazing toy! See, she can duck under the cover and climb up the side of the sofa to the top of the armrest and sit there under the cover, attacking the upholstery randomly and wiggling around like a maniac. She's under there way MORE often now than before, actually.

This morning she spent like an hour playing inside the cover and then curled up on the arm of the sofa (still inside the cover) and took a nap. So we gave up and ordered an Ikea Ektorp loveseat in teal, which was what I'd been intending to get around to all along, and they'll take the old one away to recycle when they deliver it in a couple of weeks on Wax's day off.



I love Ektorp. I've wanted one of the big fat ones for ages, since I first sat in the models at an Ikea I suppose, when I moved to Finland. Also I love the oversized, round, overstuffed (English cottage?) shape. they're just delightful for lounging in. The Ektorp sofa is considerably larger than our Klippan that we've had most of the time though, and it never really occurred to me until recently that we could just get a 2-person one. This livingroom is ironically perhaps the smallest livingroom we've ever had (though maybe not the narrowest?) - Wax disagrees about this point - but regardless of any other features, this room has every wall broken up by doors or windows near the center, so there's almost no space to put the furniture if you didn't want to, I guess, make a little island conversation group around a coffee table in the center of it. Which is perhaps what people all did with their livingrooms in 1950 when nobody anticipated focusing your eyes continually on a screen attached to one of the walls. We had two of the smaller Ikea Ektorp Jennylund chairs for years, which share the rounded look but are smaller scale - even the arm radius is smaller, and the seat is considerably so.



Wax's mom had happily adopted them but now we're stuck with them again since her death. Wax's aunt has said she wanted them ages ago, but she's just left them here indefinitely so I guess if we don't drive an hour and a half to drop them off with her they're ours (to cart to the dump presumably because they're rather in the way as it is). So we know from experience that the thick cotton twill fabric of Ektorps is not nearly as claw-sharpening friendly to cats as this tapestry stuff. Tapestry fabric is evidently one of the nicest fabrics in the world to dig your claws into. Also this loveseat will be small enough that we can hopefully put some more sharpening toys and things to destroy around it to distract the little mischief.