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.

The sweater-or-dress is long enough that, if it were a sweater, it could be finished. It will not be a sweater, though, because I’ve still got loads of yarn left.

The thing that usually happens when I try something on, happened now as well. It wasn’t quite the way I wanted, so I ripped up a good 10 centimetres. I wanted it to fit very closely around the torso and then flare somewhere around the lower hips, but that didn’t work out. The fabric is somewhat stiff, even with the added silk mohair, so instead of stretching around the body, it rode up and bunched at the waist. It may be that the weight of the skirt would pull it straight, but also maybe not, so it’s not something I want to bet on. Rip up and redo with more width around the hips so that the fabric can hang and drape nicely.

The red cardigan is done and I am starting to think of the next knitting project. (I’ve got to remember to take a proper picture of it when worn – it looks better on a body than on a table.)

Money is rather tighter this year than it has been in the past, and I’m looking for more budget-friendly yarns. There are tons and tons (almost literal tons, I think) of yarn on Tradera. I’ve been keeping an eye on the stuff that turns up there. A lot of it is nice, but not right for me; finding something that I know I will use requires patience.

This lot was interesting enough for me to bid immediately. Marks & Kattens Recycled is 100% recycled wool, and with a slightly hand-dyed feel to it – semi-solid colours rather than that perfectly even colour that is common in yarn from large-scale production. And with this purchase I get a palette of colours that I like, but might not have chosen on my own. I’ve been thinking that I want to knit more colourful designs going forward; this is a nice nudge in that direction. Plus it’s an established Swedish brand that I can buy more from. That’s a concern that has held me back from bidding on some of the yarns at Tradera: if the yarn isn’t quite enough for whatever I end up knitting, and the brand is an odd one, it might be hard to get more.

Both button bands are done, including button holes, and attached to the cardigan. Buttons are also all in place. This is, I think, the tidiest, most polished, best-finished thing I’ve ever knitted.

The embroidery club started up today. I had considered continuing with some of the ideas from an embroidery course I did a year ago, or maybe with one of the printed fabrics from the workshop this spring, but I haven’t had time to look at what I have or what I want to do. Instead I picked something where I could just get going.

This brown cardigan is great but also not. It fits me well, the yarn is soft and warm, the colour is nice, the knitting is tidy. But: I made it an awkward length that I’m not happy with. It is unflattering on me, and I find it more and more difficult to ignore that. I already have a relatively long torso and shortish lower body; a too-long cardigan emphasises that even more. And the bottom hem hits right where I am broadest, which makes me look even more unproportional.

The way it’s constructed, I can’t just unravel the bottom and make it shorter. The next best thing is to redesign it to make it look shorter, by breaking up the long vertical with something horizontal, and to draw the attention away from the hips to the waist. Hence, a discretely colourful waistband.

No, the button band looked no better with a fresh pair of eyes. I unpicked the seam, went and watched a better tutorial video, and had another go. (There’s plenty of tutorials on using mattress stitch for vertical seams in knitting, but not many that are helpful when the two edges have different gauge and go in different directions. The one I finally found was great, though.)

The seam is nearly invisible and it’s like the two pieces are one. That’s the way it’s supposed to look like. New version on the left (or top, if you’re on a small screen); old on the right/bottom.

The red cardigan has been waiting for its button bands to get finished and sewn on for two months. As usual, I put off the task because I didn’t quite know how to do it, and wasn’t sure that I’d be able to do it well.

Now I’ve made the button band, and today I sewed it on, and I am not happy with my attempt. It doesn’t even look bad in the photo – if you don’t see it up close, the seam doesn’t look to bad, I guess. But up close it looks uneven and ugly. I’ll let it rest overnight and see if I feel better about it tomorrow.

I’m going about knitting this white thing in not quite the conventional way. Usually when you knit a sweater, you finish the body first and then do the sleeves. There’s even something called “second sleeve syndrome”, where the knitter loses their enthusiasm when there’s just the one sleeve left to knit.

With this white yarn, I’m not sure how far it will last me, and I have no way to get more. When the yarn runs out, the garment is done, no matter where that is. Finishing the sleeves was thus a priority because I definitely want it to have full-length sleeves.

Will the remaining yarn be enough for a dress, as I hope? Or do I need to change my plan and aim for a sweater? Maybe I can get it to stretch longer by combining it with some other yarn, in which case the garment doesn’t need to be done when the white yarn runs out?

I’ll knit to a point where I definitely need to make a decision, and then there will be a lot of weighing and measuring and calculating and geometry. But not now. Now I can just enjoy the knitting.