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.

The cardigan has reached the point where all the pieces come together and make up a cardigan-shaped object, albeit incomplete. The end goal is not quite in sight yet but sort of on the horizon at least. And the part that is finished actually fits decently well!

This is, unfortunately, also one of those points where difficult decisions need to be made regarding size and gauge and adjustments, because reality is annoyingly not matching up with the pattern. I love the knitting but I really hate those times where I know that taking the wrong route may lead to frogging weeks’ worth of work and then spending an hour swearing while I try to get the stitches back on the needles.

I’ve now learned about the concept of lifelines which will reduce that swearing at least. So now my work is a complicated tangle of all sorts of components: not only the cardigan itself, the two balls of yarn and the needles, but also the lifeline, temporary holders for underarm stitches, and stitch markers. Just getting it all out of my basket and unbundling it all is a bit of a project, every time I pick it up to start working on it.

Here’s the yarn I was looking at yesterday. Hand-dyed soft merino wool in all sorts of beautiful colours. Suddenly I’m very motivated to finish the cardigan I’m knitting.

I knitted nine pairs of fine wool socks in a variety of colours last years. Together with a few pairs from other sources, this is enough for sock-sufficiency. I can’t remember the last time I wore a pair of cotton socks.

The yarn for the pink ones at the top of the pile was a bit of a wild card. It looked different in the photo – the yellows and whites were more prominent – and when I saw it in reality, I wasn’t even sure if I’d use the yarn at all. On a whim I still knitted up a pair of socks, because why not. Now they’re one of my favourites. Well, many of them are my favourites, but the pink ones are my happy socks. They look like candy, I thought at first, but I’m not that much into candy really. So now I think of them as the colour of summer flowers – dahlias and cosmos.

The diseased tiger socks are still weird but they’ve grown on me as well.

There’s still room for more. I wouldn’t mind a few more variegated yarns, and a proper red. Maybe a pure orange as well. I had my eyes on some beautiful hand-dyed yarns on Instagram but then I realized that they’re all made in Britain. With Brexit, I’d get hit with VAT and customs fees and what not, and the yarns are not worth that. Damn Brits and their silly Brexit.

I knit socks during meetings where I’m mostly a passive participant, to help me remain focused and not just zone out or get distracted by reddit or something. At one point I told my teammates, in case they were wondering about my unusual movements.

One of them jokingly said something about knitting a pair for him next. Size 46. Well, joke’s on him, because he’ll be getting a pair of woollen socks for Christmas, in a nice self-striping yarn with a goodly proportion of dark Urb-it green in it.

Size 46 is huge. It’s going to be hard to get the sizing right because I have no feet of that size available to try the socks on. Eric has size 42 and that’s what a pair of normal adult male feet look like in my mind. The step from his feet to size 46 is as large as the step from Adrian’s 11-year-old feet to Eric’s.

Of course I’m doing this rather last minute as usual. But I’ve got the entire weekend ahead of me still.

Python code beaten into submission, another pair of socks finished. A good day at work.

90% of the code we have at Urb-it is .NET. Whenever I have to work with any of the remaining 10%, it takes hours to even get started. It took me three hours on my own, and then another two hours together with two more developers, to get the python project to build and run on my computer. Even though I’ve done it before on that same computer. Some damn package gets updated somewhere and boom, there goes my afternoon. But that was yesterday, so today was pure productivity.

It doesn’t feel like summer any more. Sock season has begun.

I don’t think I will ever knit symmetrical socks again. These fit better than any other socks ever have.

I’ve been making do with small pieces of scrap yarn for stitch markers for years. I don’t even know why. These green things cost like 35 kr for a few dozen. Or actually double that including postage, but that is still nothing compared to the cost of, say, alpaca yarn.

They are ugly but useful. Which wasn’t really a surprise. One benefit that was a real surprise is that because they are of uniform shape and size, I can see just by looking at them whether all my increases are equidistant from each other. Of course I still count my rows but if I did happen to miscount, I’m pretty sure that the resulting misstep in the rhythm of the line of markers would make the mistake very obvious.

I have even less energy than usual when it is so hot, but I did pick up my knitting again for the first time in weeks. And of course “knitting” really means “ripping things up so I can redo them” as usual. (The sleeve cuff was too narrow, despite all the measuring and gauging etc.)

By the time I finish this cardigan, if I add up all the work I’ve actually done, I think I will have knitted the equivalent of almost two cardigans.

Knitting is all about maths.

Sock yarn comes in hanks of 100 grams. One pair of standard socks for myself or Adrian weighs 51 grams. (His are 1.5 cm shorter in the foot than mine but higher in the calf.) So one hank is just barely not enough for two pairs of socks, which is a bit unfortunate, since both Adrian and I loved this yarn. But I can make us a pair each if I use a different yarn for the sock heel for one of the pairs, which would actually be pretty practical anyway, because it will help us tell our socks apart.

This is like an arithmetics problem for elementary school.

Mum has 100 grams of colourful yarn. She knits one pair of socks using 51 grams of the yarn. After knitting a third sock, using plain brown yarn for the heel, she has 27 grams of the colourful yarn left. How much brown yarn did she use for the sock heel? After finishing the second pair of socks, how much colourful yarn will she have left over for darning?