I was going to take a photo of the cardigan-to-be, but a certain someone went all Smaug on top of it again.

I can hold the knitting and work on it, and he doesn’t care (except when the colourful stitch holders twiddle back and forth right in front of his face and he just has to bite them).

I can put the knitting down and he doesn’t care.

But when I bring out the camera and spread the knitting out and pay unusual amounts of attention to it, suddenly he claims it for himself.

I’m making progress on the next sweater. Today I just got to the point where the shoulder pieces meet in the front and everything comes together into a recognizable shape. It’s hard to judge the sizing properly at this point but it doesn’t seem to be wildly off at least.

The last cardigan took me 9 months from start to finish. This one will be less work because there will be less of it, purely physically: shorter, narrower, no overlapping fronts. And the slightly looser gauge will also make it go faster. But I doubt I’ll finish it in time to be able to warm myself in it this winter.

Store-bought socks either reach mid-calf (so they don’t fit and therefore slouch down) or ankle-height (so they’re too short to be warm). I tried to aim for a golden mean but I think I aimed too low. But one of the very nice aspects of handmade things is that I can hand-re-make them – in this case by adding another bit to the top. It kind of looks decorative, even, extra fancy.

Planning for the next knitting project; a sweater/jumper. I’ll be using the same yarn as for the fiery cardigan but in a different colour. I’m thinking of going up a step in needle size to get a slightly looser, thinner fabric – which means knitting a new gauge swatch. For the non-knitters, a gauge swatch is a small, square “trial” piece that you knit with the exact yarn and needles you plan to use for your real project, to figure out how many stitches you get per 10 cm.

For some reason I find these incredibly, unbelievably boring. I truly hate knitting gauge swatches. It makes no sense – if I was knitting a dishcloth of the same size, I doubt I’d had any negative feelings about it. It’s just knitting! Which I like! Perhaps it’s the inherent uselessness of them. You make one, do the measuring and counting, and then just… put it away to gather dust forever, or rip it up.

Still, starting knitting without swatching and then having to rip up the real thing after realizing it doesn’t fit – which would mean a lot more wasted work – would be even more annoying. So I grit my teeth and get it done.

Done with the cardigan, I need a new knitting project. This will become a shawl.

It took me four attempts to get this far before I was satisfied.

The first time I wasn’t happy with the tension. The pattern suggests 3.75 mm needles which may exist in the US but generally aren’t available in Sweden. I tried 4 mm needles, but the result was too loose and floppy.

The second time I wasn’t happy with the long edge. The pattern suggests an edge treatment that would look good in theory, but in my hands it came out too tight, so the whole long edge pulled in way too strongly.

The third time I wasn’t happy with the coloured inserts. I tried a green alpaca yarn that looked good in perfect lighting but didn’t stand out enough when seen from a distance. The red works much better.

A knitting project involves so many choices, and for every one of them I can make the wrong decision. Sometimes it doesn’t matter much but other times I can see pretty clearly that I’m on a route where I won’t be happy with the end result.

It’s a skill in and of itself, I guess, to notice which decisions matter most, and to spot problems early. The worst knitting decision I made and committed way too strongly to was choosing a pattern that didn’t work for me, with the first green cardigan, and that one was so bad that it literally took me years to get past it, because it killed all my joy and confidence. A traumatic knitting experience. But that one was so tangled up with other decisions – about yarn and needles and sizing – that it was hard to pinpoint the actual problem. And who knows, maybe I was doing something wrong that I could have fixed to make it work.

All done and finished! And I’m really pleased with the final result. Fits well, looks great, feels soft and warm. And the colour fade looks awesome.

I’m done with the knitting part of the fiery cardigan and now I just need to weave in the ends. Just. There are so many of them!

The ones from the fade from yellow to red at chest level are the worst. The choice I made back then to cut the yarn so I could knit the knit rows and purl the purl rows was, in hindsight, a stupid one. Won’t ever do that again. There is barely even room for all these yarn ends and I’m struggling to hide them without making the front edge all stiff and thick.

It’s taking forever and it’s making my eyes burn, but hopefully I can be done with it tomorrow and finish the whole cardigan before the year ends.

At least the pile of yarn ends is pretty.

The sleeves are all done and finished, and they fit. Now I’ve just got the bottom hem left – and all the ends to weave in. Almost there! I might be finished with the whole cardigan before the end of the year.

One more last-minute knitted Christmas ornament to give away, this time with an elephant pattern.

These balls were really quick and easy to make, and quite a lot of fun. Just four pattern repeats, so I’m done with it before the work has time to start feeling repetitive.

So apparently 14°C is the point where my hands get noticeably cold.

Outdoors I normally don’t need gloves until the temperature gets to around 10°C – that’s my usual “hat and glove” point. But then I’m walking, moving my arms and moving the blood around, and not holding a cold piece of plastic like a computer mouse. Sitting still and mousing around feels much colder.

It’s 14°C inside and –14°C outside and that’s probably as cold as it will get here this winter – the weather will get warmer for sure (this is well below average for a Stockholm winter), the electricity prices will go down perhaps not to normal but to at least less painful levels, and we’re getting a heat pump installed today. But a pair of fingerless typing gloves could still be useful to have later as well.

I have a standard sock pattern that works well for my feet, and only needs minor adjustments for Adrian’s. It’s barely modified from a standard pattern that I found for free on the internet. I thought gloves might be the same – but the standard glove pattern that most websites have didn’t fit my hands at all. When I made the thumb gusset long enough to reach from the base of the thumb to the split between thumb and palm, the thumb itself came out ridiculously wide.

So it’s back to that most common of knitting techniques: ripping it all up and redoing it. The glove on the left is my second, better fitting attempt; the one on the right I just started ripping up.

I’m still puzzled about the patterns all being so off. When I asked for thumb gusset shaping advice on Reddit, the responders all unanimously said that what I thought was the standard, was not. I should increase on every 3rd round, they said, not every 2nd – which the websites and books all had told me to do.