This seemingly simple project is turning into the most challenging thing I have ever knitted. I have never had to redo this much of any other garment.

New roadblock: tension. I have knitted numerous sweaters and cardigans and shawls never, I mean never, had trouble with tension. My stitches are even and smooth, no matter whether I’m knitting flat or in the round, stockinette or ribbing or lace. Until now. Apparently I am unable to maintain even tension with this yarn. My purl rows are looser, the fabric is looking sloppy and uneven, and the gauge doesn’t match so the armhole sizing is entirely off. (The bottom part was knit in the round so there were no purl rows involved. Switch to knitting flat, and boom, a mess.) So – rip it back again and redo it. I guess it’s back to two different-sized needles for me, 3.5 mm for knit rows and 3 mm for purl rows.

Bought and installed a few more smart plugs to combat autumn’s dark evenings.

I like having cosy lighting in the living areas. Actually, in all parts of the house. There are three independent light sources in my bedroom, five in the sun room, six in the other living room, five in the kitchen. Many of the smaller lamps get switched on automatically, on a timer, with Tapo smart plugs. I don’t mind the manual effort of walking a round and turning them on – but I do mind the darkness before I notice that I need to do it. So now even more of them turn on automatically. Instead of me looking up and discovering just how dark the house has gotten, I now look up as the lights click on, and it feels so much nicer.

Attempt #5 of the knit top is progressing well. It was on hiatus for a while, waiting for armhole and neckline calculations, but I did the math this weekend and now I’m on track again. Just using a single circular needle, not having to switch between two different-sized ones, definitely helps the work go faster.

From my mending pile, a pair of Ingrid’s jeans, with a broken zipper. The jeans themselves are still in good shape, but with a missing tooth, the zipper isn’t usable.

Annoyingly, I won’t be able to fix it. The zipper is attached to a placket of fabric that has been sewed to the rest of the trousers with a serger, and I can’t get at the zipper without ripping that serged seam. The other half of the zipper is likewise blocked in by a double-needle seam, which I’d need to rip. The ripping is doable, but reattaching everything in a decently tidy way would be really hard. I would almost be reconstructing the whole fly from scratch, without the special machines that were used for the original.

There’s a new EU law enforcing consumers’ right to repair, applying to electronics and household goods. I do wish there was something similar for clothing. Maybe in another decade or two.

Went for a walk and ambled through one of the tiny local pocket woods, squeezed in between all the back gardens.

There are two of these close to me, and both are steep rocky hills, clearly left as they are because it would be way too much work to make the ground usable for construction.

Both hills are topped with a heap of rocks. Those, I assume, originate from the gardens next to the woods. Just like the pile of rocks in my garden right now – the people who built these houses a hundred years ago were levelling out their plots of land, preparing the ground for building and for gardening, and ran across plenty of rocks. If my garden backed onto a wood like this, I would absolutely be rolling my rocks up the hill and onto the pile.

Embroidery club turned into preparedness meeting. Not quite, but a bit.

The embroidery club meetings take place at a community center/adult education association. We are technically a study circle, which counts as adult education, so we get free space there, in return for reporting our membership and attendance numbers.

Today, Svenska Lottakåren had a meeting in a room next to ours. They’re an all-female volunteer civil defence organization, and they had an information meeting about crisis preparedness. They were having a bit of a lull in visitors, so they invited all of us over. I’m reasonably well-informed about the topic, so there wasn’t much that was new to me. Like, I’m very aware that I should have food and drinking water and emergency lighting etc at home, and I actually do. (I even have a solar-powered USB charger, and a wind-up radio.)

One thing I know I’m missing is an emergency cash reserve. If payment systems ever go down, I’m screwed. That goes on my to do list now.

It’s peak season for Swedish apples. The large Coop supermarket has a good selection, four domestic varieties on sale right now. (They’ve managed to misspell the names of three out of the four, which has got to be some kind of a record.)

Interestingly, it’s not the same varieties that they had last year. I think Aroma was maybe there last year as well – it’s a very popular sort – but not the others. Aroma is kind of boring in my opinion, which may be why why it sells well. I like Gravensteiner best out of these four, it’s crisp and juicy and has lots of flavour. Rubinola is too firm for my taste, and Sunrise is too mealy.

The other supermarkets here don’t seem to have noticed apple season at all. The small Coop barely has any seasonal variation in their produce department, they just sell the same things year round. ICA is usually better at having some variety in their vegetable offering, but apparently not when it comes to apples.

Had a dentist’s appointment today. I have inherited pretty weak teeth from my mum – I used to always have cavities, no matter what I did, even with diligent brushing and no snacking between meals. I had resigned myself to having some work done on my teeth at every annual check-up. Then at one point a dentist recommended fluoride mouth wash, and I think that was the turning point. With that – plus twice-daily brushing and daily flossing – I usually get an all-clear these days. They still charge an arm and a leg, though.

Photo of Malmskillnadstrappan, up from Kungsgatan to Malmskillnadsgatan and onwards to the Active Solution office.

Dance class soon, but an hour of free time before that.

Alvik (where the class takes place) is a transit area for me, a traffic junction. I cycle through Alvik on my way to Sortera in Liljeholmen, and I cycle through it in a different direction to get to central Stockholm. I don’t think I’ve ever spent time in Alvik before this. The first time I hung out at a coffee shop, and last week I went for a walk. Today I was thinking of sitting outside, but the sun is getting low and Alvik faces east, so it’s all in shade by six o’clock.

But! The part of town on other side of the water will then face west, and will get all the evening sun. I had vague memories of hearing about bathing cliffs in Fredhäll, which should be somewhere about there.

The waterside rocks were nice and warm in the sun, and there was a sheltered little nook with grass to sit on. Traffic noise from the Traneberg bridge was always there, but sometimes I could almost forget about it. I’ve cycled over the bridge so many times but never seen it from this angle before.

The Thursday embroidery group is arranging an exhibition. I haven’t been too interested – it’s not why I’m participating in the group – but I’m happy to help fill the walls. The Stockholm embroidery, the green skirt, the black cardigan, the print + organza swirls – and the black/white/red triptych. Which I haven’t properly finished, even though the three constituent parts have been complete for months.

The ladies in charge of hanging the exhibition are doing it on Tuesday at 10. Yesterday I bought unbleached linen fabric, and today I spent the morning on putting it all together. Covered a piece of foamboard with the linen fabric, stitched the corners of the pieces to it, and attached a piece of wire for hanging.

I had hoped to find the same brick red fabric that I used in the embroidery itself, that would have looked quite dramatic. But of course the shop didn’t have it in stock anymore. Maybe it actually looks better this way.