Long day trip to Stockholm

On Tuesday we had a long productive day trip to Stockholm.

We met with Daniel Fredriksson, who plays a nordic mandola made by Ola, and who very kindly agreed to meet with us at his office midday so Mills could try it out and get really great answers to all his questions. Afterward we wandered around Stockholm, found the giant marketplace at Sergels Torg (which stars in our Pimsleur learn-Swedish tapes) and had a very satisfying Indian lunch at Hurry Curry, did some shopping-y errands and scoped out a Myrorna butik (Salvation Army thrift store).

In the evening, we went to visit our friends Gunnar & Lena just south of town. I first met them at the Nisswastämman last summer in MN, and Mills first met Gunnar last month at NFF camp. We very much enjoyed getting to visit with them, and I’m hoping to see more of them throughout the year. Gunnar has an impressive workshop set up to support his fiddle-building habit, which has taken him to the big annual fall meeting in Cremona for the past couple of years, so we enjoyed hearing about tools and techniques and seeing photos. Lena’s half of the beautiful studio room features serious tools for textile work — the most impressive ironing setup I’ve seen, beautiful embroidery, a knitting design project being blocked, and she is also a folkdräkt (costume) expert. Yummy dinner, fun tunes (we each tried out the octave-violin Gunnar had set up), some show-and-tell of CDs we didn’t know about yet.