I’m waiting for the yarn for my cardigan. Meanwhile I gave my restless hands a pair of socks to knit for Christmas.

Another swatch ahead of the planned new cardigan. I’ve decided on a yarn combination as well as a pattern. Now comes the hardest part: calculating gauge and adjusting all the stitch counts. I’m mentally already prepared for having to start, then rip it up and start over because the sizing will be off. Probably more than once. No matter how much I measure and calculate, reality always turns out different.

Trying to decide on the right yarn or yarns for my cardigan.

Left to right: Rauma Inca Alpakka (100% alpaca), Rauma Finull (100% wool), Sandnes Tynn Silk Mohair (57% mohair, 15% wool, 28% silk).

I made a swatch with the wool and mohair together, with a few different needle sizes. Then another with the wool on its own. I wasn’t quite satisfied with any of them. The wool and mohair combo was a bit too thick. The wool on its own – too scratchy. (At first when knitting with the wool and mohair together, I started wondering if the mohair made any difference at all. It’s so thin, doesn’t it get lost among all the wool? Feeling the two side by side removed all doubt.)

Maybe I should have tried some merino wool after all… When I felt the merino yarns in the shop, they all felt too smooth and bland, so I didn’t buy any. But perhaps it would have worked out together with the mohair?

Today I went and bought a ball of alpaca yarn and knitted yet another swatch with alpaca + mohair, and then one more with some leftover alpaca yarn from the green cardigan, again together with the mohair.

The alpaca/mohair combination is a clear winner. Softer than lambswool, fluffier than merino – so lovely to touch!

And in the photo it all just looks black.

Today I forced myself to get out of the house and cycle to a yarn shop on Söder. (I have enough flex hours accumulated that I can easily take half a day off when I want to.)

I want to knit another cardigan, so I need yarn. Sock yarn I can buy on the internet but a cardigan is a larger investment. I want to see the yarn up close and touch it before buying.

I’m planning to knit a black cardigan. Black. Unimaginative and perhaps a bit boring, yes. When I’m wearing a colourful skirt or a patterned dress, the rest of the outfit sometimes has to take a step back.

The yarn shop Litet Nystan was full of lovely yarns. The ones that my eyes and hands kept returning to were the colourful, variegated, hand-dyed ones. I will have to find a project for these, after the black cardigan.

Among the black yarns I couldn’t find any that quite felt like what I had in mind. The merino wools were too smooth and bland; the plain Swedish and Norwegian wools too thick and not soft enough. I came home with a wool yarn and a mohair blend that, when combined, will hopefully work out. The wool will provide thickness and body and the mohair will soften it.

I had a restaurant lunch (somewhat disappointing) and bought some mini Sarah Bernhardt cakes for myself, before spending almost an hour in the yarn shop and then cycling back home. By the time I was unlocking my bike again to head home, it was twilight.

It felt good to get out of the house and see and do something new. I needed this.

The scarf is finished, and it came out just as lovely as I had hoped and expected. This is one of my most successful knitting projects ever.

Now to wait for winter – and to look for a new project.

I had a long online meeting this morning and knitted a good 15 cm of my scarf. Now that I’ve internalized the pattern, it requires so little thinking that I can easily do it while focusing 95% of my attention on the meeting.

As the scarf is getting longer, I have to keep most of it rolled up while I’m working on it. Otherwise it gets all twisted and tangled. Socks, hats and cardigans don’t do that.

And I haven’t had to rip up anything at all for weeks, since I figured out the root cause of my repeated mistakes!

… aaand here I am, ripping up a good 15 rows of my knitting again. This is starting to turn into a bad habit.

This time I figured out the problem, though, so hopefully this was the last time. Apparently I tend to forget the last increase on right-leaning rows. And I only notice when I get to the corresponding decreases many rows later, and discover that I don’t have enough stitches left to decrease. Now I’ll be extra vigilant with those increases.

This scarf I’m knitting is very pleasant to knit, but I’m also discovering that it is entirely unforgiving. I make one teensy little mistake, and there is just no way to recover without the mistake being glaringly obvious. The pattern is so large, so regular, and so distinct that any deviation really stands out, like a streaker in the middle of a marching band. Sometimes I even notice the mistake nearly immediately but when I try to correct it, I make things worse instead, so I end up unravelling entire rows after all.

I had bought a wonderful yarn at some point – a variegated Viking Nordlys. It is sold as a sock yarn, and that’s what I bought it for. But when I touched it, the yarn felt so soft and thin that I thought I’d wear right through it if I made it into socks. So I went looking for a new project for it.

There is a wonderful knitting site called Ravelry. Everything on Ravelry is indexed and linked to everything else – yarns to projects to patterns, and so on. Each pattern links to actual projects that actual people have made following that pattern – often you can see many varieties of a cardigan, which really helps to see what it could look like. And there are thousands upon thousands of patterns. It’s my first point of call when I am looking for ideas for knitting projects.

I looked for projects using the Nordlys yarn, found some, which sparked new ideas, and finally decided on this Icicle scarf.

Ordered the book (Nancy Marchant’s Knitting Fresh Brioche). Waited nearly two weeks for it to arrive. Opened it, and nearly gave up. The patterns looked very intimidating. The written instructions for this scarf cover over two full pages!

Still, I tried it out with some scrap yarn, and it turned out to be quite doable, as long as I paid close attention to what I was doing. As soon as I didn’t, I started making mistakes, and the only way to recover from a mistake in two-colour brioche is to rip up everything you did since the mistake, one stitch at a time.

After the first 20 rows or so, I started getting the hang of it. I put away the swatch and started on the real thing with my beautiful yarn. With some practice, the pattern doesn’t require quite that single-minded focus any more. I can see the pattern in the pattern, so to say, and understand it rather than just follow it mechanically. It’s actually quite fun to knit.

And just look at how beautifully the scarf is turning out! On the front, the orange/yellow/green yarn is like autumn leaves, with the light gray like a cloudy autumn sky peeking through the leaves, providing depth and contrast. The rear side is like the first day of winter, with the autumn leaves covered in hoarfrost.

1. Sewed the buttons onto my cardigan. The buttonholes are tiny (even though I did follow the pattern instructions to the dot) so I had to make really small buttons, and still they’re quite fiddly to get through the holes. Either the buttonholes will stretch a bit with time, or I might end up not using them much.

I’m glad the cardigan is done and I can start using it when autumn comes.

2. Painted the second coat on the garden sofa. Looking good!

It looks like some spots (not in the photo) may need a third coat. The old dark blue colour is shining through a bit, because my first coat of paint didn’t adhere well. I guess I wasn’t aggressive enough with the sandpaper.

3. Sewed a needle book for rarely used and reserve needles. We have a pin cushion for the three or four needles we use most often for ordinary sewing, but all the others have been in their factory packaging (which is not made for long term storage and tends to fall apart with time) or stuck into loose pieces of paper or fabric. Now they’re all tidily stored: small needles, large needles, blunt-tipped embroidery needles of various sizes, and cutting point leather needles.

To be honest, tidying up the needles was just an excuse. It’s not been a high priority on my list. It really was just a way to find something small and useful to do with embroidery. I like small projects – a larger project can turn from fun into a must, but a small one that I can finish in one sitting is pure fun.

Wool felt is such a wonderful crafts material! It feels nice to the touch, it’s durable and dirt-resistant, and it is so easy to work with because it doesn’t fray. I bought a bunch of felt pieces for my advent calendar in 2011 and I still have some scraps left of that stash in odd colours. That’s actually why this needle book ended up being in green as well – I only had large enough pieces of felt in a few colours, and only the greens harmonized with each other. I was getting a bit fed up with all the green today so I compensated with extra colourful decorations not in green.

The embroidery is all chain stitch and detached chain stitch. I’m pretty pleased with how tidy I managed to keep the rear side of the front cover. I could have gone all fancy and added a lining to hide it but (a) I don’t want the added bulk, and (b) I like the raw edges.