Finishing date: April 2025. Photographed through self-timer by Katja Malmborg in May 2025.
So, I went to Lofoten, northern Norway, for a work thing in the end of May. It was a good place to wear my new cardigan with flower-embroidered sleeves.
That’s the thing, though, with photographing on location: I can rarely bring Natalia, my original knitwear photography partner-in-crime, with me. So, for one, when taking these photos, I was working with the self-timer, running back and forth between the cliffs by this bay in Lofoten, northern Norway. Half of the photos are blurry, out of focus, or with me in a weird pose, not having made it to the proper spot before the timer went off. But it’s also that the styling becomes so much simpler. No enormous crowns or props. I miss the extravagance. I hope we get to do it again sometime. When our lives are more in sync again.
But, with this cardigan, maybe the simplicity is ok. I hadn’t planned to embroider so many flowers on the sleeves. Once I got started, though, I enjoyed it so much so that I just didn’t stop until the sleeves were full. The cardigan is kind of a statement now. A crown on top of that would probably have been overwhelming.
No, let the minimalist styling give space for the cardigan to speak for itself. In conversation with the breathtaking landscapes of Lofoten.
2025 END-OF-YEAR REFLECTION
The body in the embroidered flower cardigan. On a rock by the North Atlantic Ocean. Lofoten, end of May. Half way.
I, in my body, have had a tumultuous year 2025. The exhaustion, the bleeding, surgery, medications that have all kinds of adventurous side effects, recovery that meant I needed to let my body rest, mentally and physically.
Then, developing plantar fasciitis (inflammation in my heel) because, all the other pain and side-effects from blood loss made me not properly notice that my foot was starting to ache from the long hours of standing barefoot while obsessively weaving during sick leave. So, during the second half of the year, I had to avoid walking. Recovery is such a long, slow process.
I have cancelled so many plans with people. Not because I did not want to see them, but because the idea of having to keep up a conversation felt overwhelming. The thought of physically transporting myself places, like I was drained of energy before I had even started the journey.
I have gained weight. So much weight. And also, I guess, aged. I don’t recognize myself when I look in the mirror. It is new in my life, having to start thinking more carefully about what I eat, thinking about my body as something to be dealt with, balancing side-effects of medications I still have to take. I have felt betrayed – not for the weight as such, but for the whole thing. I want to eat stupid stuff, to punish my body and to feel better. Some days, I let myself.
But that is not how it works. I know that. I need to look for other comforts. And also: Be okay with my body as it is now. It has been through so much. We are not in opposition.
This is how I want to enter into the new year: With a body that slowly is starting to feel more like me again.
Katja Malmborg 