Here is the white dress in all its glory.

It came out just the way I had envisioned it. Fits well, looks great. By far the most elegant thing I have created.

And the most labour-intensive one. I tried to roughly estimate how many stitches I knit, and came up with about 133 000.

I am very grateful to my friend in Estonia who gave me the yarn that started this project. It’s a lovely fine vintage wool yarn, probably hand-spun and unbleached. I don’t think I could have found anything like it from a commercial source. I held it double with a silk mohair, and the end result is soft and woolly, but still drapes well.

This is no superwash merino yarn, the kind that almost doesn’t feel like wool, and it definitely feels woolly against my skin. Not so that bothers me – just so that I am aware of it. Like a gentle reminder that it is there, and it is wool. (I’m writing this several weeks later, after I’ve had a chance to wear it to a family Christmas party for several hours.)

I had planned to add embroidery to the dress, to make it look less stark. Now that I have it in front of me, I rather like it in all its simplicity. I think I’ll hold off on the embroidery for now.

The knitted white dress is pretty much done! I set myself the goal of finishing it this year, and I’m going to make it. I only have the hem to finish now.

The skirt has curled up every time I’ve tried the dress on. It’s getting a folded hem and a lead weight cord (the kind that is often used for curtain hems) inside that to straighten it out.

The body of the striped sweater is done. Now I need to do something about all the yarn ends.

I didn’t even cut the yarn for every stripe – only when it was unused for two centimetres or so. Even so, they are SO MANY. I regret that choice; I should have just lived with the long floats.

I really do not need any more socks, but I do need a background knitting project for meetings etc. Gloves are almost like socks, right? And I could do with a pair of basic, everyday knitted gloves. Something less fancy than the leather gloves I wear to town – more in style with a worn shell jacket than a fitted wool coat.

I don’t know what I was thinking. A glove is nothing like a sock! And a first glove, especially, is nothing like the 40th sock.

I can knit a sock with a standard fingering-weight sock yarn mostly without thinking. Cast on 60 stitches, knit 48 rows of ribbing for the leg, 18 rows of heel flap, etc etc. Adjust to 64/48/20 if the yarn is 420 m/hg instead of 400 m.

Knitting a glove, though? For the first time for this pair of hands with this particular yarn? It’s constant measuring, ripping up, picking up the stitches, re-knitting. The thumb took me two attempts, and the little finger took three. The polar opposite of mindless background knitting.

So now I have three ongoing knitting projects, and still nothing to bring with me to the office.

I’ve found myself a knitting club!

While I’ve been going to my embroidery club for close to three years now, I haven’t done anything similar with knitting – even though I knit a lot more than I embroider.

I tried a knitting café a couple of times but it was not my thing. People were sitting with those they came with, or otherwise knew, and they were not particularly interested in socializing with newcomers. I didn’t really get anything out of those sessions to be honest.

Today I went to a knitting club in Sundbyberg, to see what that was like. I’m a member of Sticka!, Sweden’s national knitting organization, and they publish a list of local clubs on their website.

I had such a wonderful time. The atmosphere was incredibly welcoming: people were helping each other, complimenting others’ work, sharing thoughts. The person in charge of the group was very focused on welcoming and including everyone. I think this may have been what was missing at the knitting café: someone to set the (right) tone.

Three hours passed in the blink of an eye. I will absolutely be going back. Maybe not on the weeks when the kids are here – I don’t want to miss so much of my time with them – but definitely on the other weeks.

I wanted my knitting for my first time there to be something simple, so that I could focus on the social side of it. Which meant bringing the dress. It’s getting bulky and sprawly, but I’ve worked out a way to roll it up and stuff it into my pillowcase-turned-project-bag such a way that I can work on it without taking all of it out. The knitting gets protection, and the balls of yarn are kept contained.

The dress is starting to look dress-shaped.

It is also starting to get quite bulky, which makes it harder to work on. That’s the price I pay for a sleek silhouette. Some knitting patterns for dresses have you knit them in two parts – top and bottom – but the dress I pictured in my head was all in one piece, and I’m sticking to that plan.

On the plus side (ha!), the number of stitches has now increased to the point where they fill the entire cable and I don’t need to use a magic loop any more.

I’m making a sweater out of (five of the) six recycled yarns. A ribbed raglan sweater in crazy stripes.

This is not the kind of thing I normally wear. There is nothing in my wardrobe even remotely like it. I have been doubting my design decisions about this thing all the way. Then again, I had strong doubts about the last crazy sweater I made, and it still ended up among my favourites.

Even if it does end up not worn much, it’s been a useful learning experience. I’m experimenting with different rates of raglan decreases for the shoulder section, which I haven’t done before. You can do all the calculating and measuring you want, but the only way to really see if the numbers work out, is to knit the thing.

It’s also been surprisingly fun to knit. For the stripes, I bought a commercial pattern (Free Spirit) to follow, because fiddling around with those did not sound like an enjoyable task. This pattern does a good job of mixing up the colours in clever ways, much better than any attempt of mine would have been. It doesn’t try to keep all five going all the time – it focuses on, say, three of them for about eight or ten rows, then swaps in one of the others, etc. It’s still an awful lot of colour changes, and the inside is a mess of yarn ends and needle ends, but there won’t be an end to weave in for every single row.

The 3×1 ribbing is a constant mental challenge. I am so used to 2×2 ribbing for sock legs that I revert to that as soon as I lose focus. I can watch or listen to something while knitting this, but it’s far from mindless knitting.

Posting this with a slight delay. Now that Ingrid’s birthday has passed, I can share pictures of a pair of socks I made as a gift for her. These are the softest, fuzziest thing I have ever knit. Merino sock yarn with pink and blue speckles, paired with a chunky white mohair. I want to say that they feel like a cloud, but clouds are notoriously cold and wet. They feel like a cloud should feel?

Six colours is too much. Remove almost any one of them, and suddenly the rest cohere, where before they never quite fit together in my eyes.

Take away the sharp white, and now there’s a set with a 1970s vibe.

Take away the dark grey for a lighter, brighter version of the above.

Take away the mustard yellow, and now it’s red tones combined with a greyscale.

Take away the pink, and the red and mustard make up a muted pair, with a greyscale in the background again.

The white, I think, is the odd one out – sharp and bright compared to all the other yarns. Plus it’s going to be the easiest one to use in some other project in the future.

This yarn will be a sweater. A striped one, I’m pretty sure. But the rest is not as obvious.

Held singly, or double? It would be nice to knit something that goes fast, when my other project is a slow one – thin yarn, large garment. But do I like the look and feel of this yarn when held double? Hmm.

Plain stripes? Marled? Stripes with a garter ridge in between? Garter ridges all the way? Stripes combined with ribbing?

Too much freedom.