Sewed a grocery shopping bag to give away as a birthday present. It has a very subtle machine-embroidered letter “k” that I now see is nearly invisible in the photo, despite being quite large.

I expected this project to take about an hour, but it took almost exactly twice as long. I even did some estimating – and was still way off.

Measure, cut, sew edges, sew edges once more for an enclosed seam, pin top hem, sew top hem, measure handles, cut handles, sew handles, attach handles. 10 steps, say 5 minutes each, that’s 50 minutes, round up to an hour.

The zigzag embroidered letter was a last-minute afterthought, but that wasn’t the thing that made the whole project take so much longer than expected. No, it was totally ordinary work that I had simply not accounted for – some of which I might have expected if I had planned more carefully, and some that came out of nowhere.

Ironing the fabric (and setting up the ironing board, and waiting for the iron to heat up, etc etc). Piecing together one of the faces of the bag out of two separate pieces because the fabric scraps I had were too oddly shaped. Folding the top hem, twice, in a stiff fabric. Measuring for the placement of the handles. Fighting with the sewing machine when sewing over the place where the handles attach to the body of the bag and there are like seven layers of fabric to punch through. Refilling the bottom bobbin when it ran out of thread. Fighting with the machine again when it made crazy tangles after I replaced the bobbin, because the top thread had gotten out of one of the hooks it needs to run through, without me noticing.

Estimating is hard. It’s a good thing I was in no hurry. The birthday in question isn’t until Sunday – oodles of time left! – so this didn’t matter at all. And the end result looks pretty nice, even though it’s not very photogenic.

1 finished pair of socks: 48 grams.
Leftover yarn: 54 grams.
I can get a whole other pair of socks out of that, which is so much better than having yarn for almost-but-not-quite a pair and then having to make up the difference with something else.

I’m getting back in the habit of spending at least one day a week in an office, so that I can meet some people and have something happening around me.

After work I take the opportunity to run small errands. Spånga has absolutely nothing when it comes to stores, so anything I want to buy that I can’t get a supermarket, I either need to order online, or drive somewhere for. Driving to some mall just to get a packet of sewing machine needles feels absurd, and so does paying 49 kronor for postage. So these office days often solve several problems in one go. Today: sewing machine needles for stretchy fabrics, a pair of small scissors, but not the knitting needles I wanted.

I’ve bought some cat toys for Nysse, and made one or two myself. The first few were fun for several evenings. Since then, though, he usually loses interest quite quickly in a new toy.

One kind of toy that keeps entertaining him more than most is empty toilet paper rolls. (Also, Adrian’s rubber eraser, and a pen topped with a large eraser.) They bounce, and move in a slightly unpredictable manner. Plus the toilet paper rolls can be attacked and killed. But afterwards, when they’re flattened and torn up and full of holes, they are no longer interesting.

The cat is not allowed on the kitchen table while we’re eating, or on the kitchen counters while we’re cooking. And not on the stovetop, ever, or at least while we catch him at it.

We’ve given up on the sink, though, and declared it a cats-allowed zone. I don’t expect the sink to be clean the same way that I expect the counters to be – I may put food on the counters and then expect it to still be clean enough to eat, but I don’t expect that from the bottom of the sink. Now we just assume that anything in or by the sink is contaminated and not for reuse for human meals (unless we’ve watched it all the time).

Nysse will lick and eat just about anything that we put in the sink, from butter knives and measuring cups with traces of milk, to scraps of carrot peel and globs of oatmeal porridge. He manages to clean cheese graters and kitchen knives without hurting himself. And he can pry up the drain basket – with his claws, I assume – to get at the stuff there.

Nysse is spending more and more time outside, and it seems to be good for him. When he comes back inside, he’s often full of vim and vigour, races from one end of the house to another and play-attacks random things.

He would also like to attack things outside, I’m sure. Such as the flock of magpies who surrounded him this morning. Both the magpies and Nysse seem to view the garden as their territory and are trying to intimidate or chase away the other. Or maybe they’re both just bastards who enjoy mocking the other.

Nysse was way up in the tree, surrounded by five or six angrily chattering magpies, trying to get closer to them and take them out. Which of course he didn’t succeed with, since he cannot actually fly, unlike the magpies. I tried to capture them all in a photo but the magpies fled as soon as I opened the door.

The cardigan is nearly finished. Today I got the yoke done and could try it on in its finished shape. There are details left, such as a collar and a button band, and various seams to finish, but the overall shape is there. And it fits! I had to do so much guessing about the numbers when I started the yoke that I was mentally fully prepared to have to redo all of it. That’s why the orange lifelines are there, to make it easier to frog the yoke down to each of those lines. But it actually looks like I got it right.

Nystagmus of course interpreted the cardigan as a combination cat bed and toy. He’s been uninterested in my knitting most of the time, which I’m rather relieved about – pop culture had led me to expect him to attack any and all yarn immediately, which he doesn’t. But when yarn happens to dangle right in front of him, or when fluffy things are laid out on the floor, he wants them for himself.

February is supposed to be the coldest month of the year. Instead of a thick blanket of snow, we have +5°C, and snowdrops are blossoming.

I spent the whole day at the Urb-it office, much of it in meetings or informal chats. It was all useful and enjoyable and interesting, but by the end of the day I was completely done in. I’m not used to this kind of thing any more. I didn’t even take single photo, even though we have pretty cool rooftop views.

I just noticed that the pile on my desk of little things – things I should take care of or do something with – was all black, white and green. This didn’t in any way help me actually take care of any of those things, except for putting away the stitch marker. (That’s the thing that looks like a plastic safety pin.)