Among my errands on Wednesday I bought buttons for the black cardigan. This allowed me to finish it by knitting the button band and buttonholes.

Overall it came out really nice. The lace looks pretty and has good definition even in the black, fuzzy yarn. The fit is good, my pattern tweaks mostly worked out, and it feels super soft and fuzzy without being too warm. I already started wearing it before I had the buttons in place because it’s just so cosy.

There’s some bunching around the armholes – I had to go up several sizes for the sleeves (this was clearly sized for ladies with twiggy arms) and it wasn’t easy to adjust the raglan shoulder shaping to fit them in.

I did plan to go yarn shopping yesterday, but I was only going to buy a single hank, just for swatching. After swatching I was going to measure and plan and think, and only then would I go back to buy yarn for real. Instead I came home with the materials for an entire cardigan.

I had my sights set on Tosh Merino Light, a luxuriously soft yarn in the most brilliant hand-dyed colours. Kind of expensive, but hey, the last cardigan I knitted took me a year, and 1500 kronor or so for a year’s entertainment is pretty good value for money.

To my shock I saw that there was only a single hank left of the colourway I loved most (Tosh Merino Light – Carolina Reaper). The yarn is made in the US, so ordering more would mean unpredictable weeks of waiting, which I didn’t feel like, at all.

So I grabbed that single hank and designed my next cardigan project around it on the spot. Together with three matching colours it fit into a yellow-orange-red fade. Which means the pattern should be seamless (to make that fade work) and relatively pared-down, with none of the lacy or textured patterns I’ve been considering. Constraints always make decisions easier.

Danse Macabre at Kulturhuset. A mixture of theatre, dance and circus.

This was the weirdest thing I’ve seen in a long time.

The scene was covered in garbage. At the rear, a large construction consisting of a steep hill of sorts, and a box/room/house balancing on top of it. The box/room/house was often but not always tilting quite steeply left and right at a constant pace.

On the plus side, three of the people on the scene were really skilled as both actors, dancers and acrobats (and one of them as a singer). The fourth one seemed to be a bit of a filler, with not much to do and not much skill either – later I found out he was the director. I guess he wanted to stand on the scene, too.

The performance itself was a jumbled mixture of all imaginable things. I couldn’t discern any consistent theme or tone. It was so wildly inconsistent that the surprises stopped being surprising and interesting and just made me roll my eyes. It was as if the director/choreographer had just thrown in everything he could think of. Childish, and not in the sense of unbridled creativity, but more like “look at me being all crazy, now you all have to laugh at me”. And most of these fancies were abandoned soon after their introduction. Nothing actually went anywhere.

“Let’s put the dancers in a tilting box and let them hang off the walls! Let’s give the old guy a silly voice like a whiny kid! Let’s pretend he doesn’t know how to put on a shoe! Let’s make the long-haired actors hang their hair in front of their faces so we can’t see them! Let’s make the guy sing! Let’s make the guy give birth to a bundle of clothes, with really realistic groans and screams! Let’s have the small girl get inside an XXL hoodie and put the wrong body part out of the wrong opening! Let’s give the skeleton guy a pair of fake legs to hold so it looks like he has four legs! Let’s make them all stuff garbage inside their clothes! Look at us being so funny and unpredictable!”

I was yawning by the end of it, and so were the people next to me. At the end, the cast were clapping their hands to pull more applause out of the not-very-impressed audience.

The two parts that I actually appreciated were Dimitri Jourde’s singing, and the dancing inside the tilting box, which contained both actual development and progression and plenty of skill.

Today was Wednesday and thus an office day. Afterwards I ran a bunch of errands, went yarn shopping and then to the theatre. This statue in Björns trädgård with its knitted armbands caught my eye as I was walking to Litet Nystan, my current favourite yarn shop. Very symbolic.

The cat often sleeps sort of upside down, with its chin up in the air. I didn’t know that was a thing.

It’s been sunny and above zero for days and days now, and the ice and snow are quickly melting away. Except on the streets that have a forest just to the south, blocking the sun. In those places the asphalt is barely even visible in small patches, and most of the ground is still covered in a thick, dirty, slippery crust. I feel kind of sorry for the people who live on those streets.

The Venus flytrap that had started to grow a flower stalk literally a month ago is finally actually flowering, with pretty, delicate, white blossoms.

No wonder it took the plant a month to produce the stalk – it’s quite disproportionately long. I’m not sure it would even be able to support its own weight without the help of the windowpane.

My black cardigan is more or less finished. I steam blocked it today, and later also added a collar and a button band. The only thing missing is the buttonhole band, which I cannot make without buttons, because I don’t know how many or how large the buttonholes will need to be. But I can’t wait to start using the cardigan because it is so incredibly soft and comfy, so I’ll just pretend for a short while that it’s meant to be worn unbuttoned.

It’s time to bring out the camera bracelet again, to remind me to take photos. I’ve forgotten more often than I like, and then cheated by taking two photos the next day.

We spent most of the day in the car, driving home from Branäs. The first couple of hours were pretty unpleasant. The roads didn’t even seem to be in a bad state – they were just bumpy. Nysse was complaining all the time, and Adrian got carsick. I can’t remember the roads to the other ski resorts being this bad. Maybe it’s just my selective memory, though.

We took a longer break in Karlskoga. While Eric & the kids bought lunch at Max, I took Nysse for a walk. Both of us are more used and attuned to each other, so the experience was smoother than our early attempts. He knows to not try and jump or pounce; I’ve learned that I need to keep constant tension on the leash so that he is reminded of its existence, and also so that it doesn’t touch his back, which he seems to find annoying. It’s still not like a pleasant walk with a dog – Nysse doesn’t so much walk as skulk through the scruffiest bushes and shrubs, and try to drag me into other people’s gardens.

I completely forgot to take photos during the day, though.