This is what happens when you leave me to my own devices. There are knitting projects all over the coffee table, in all stages of life. They used to fit into a basket or two, but somehow they’ve multiplied and spread out.

The red at the bottom left is an alpaca mix that I, daringly, bought from Tradera. Last time I bought second-hand yarn I ended up sending it back because it smelled so bad. And guess what? This yarn also smells. Luckily not of toilet cleaner this time, just a faint floral soapy smell. I’m hesitating between knitting first and washing when finished, and unwinding it all so I can wash it first.

The white in the basket on the right is one step further along. I’ve started swatching, to get a feeling for the yarn and figure out what it’s best suited for.

The reddish brown on the top right is well underway. It’ll be a pair of felted slippers.

The other basket has all my sock yarns and an ongoing pair of socks.

Finally, in the middle, there’s the sweater that I reknitted the hem for. I’ve just got a few yarn ends to weave in (which I’ll be doing tonight) and then it will be ready for use again, better than before.

The super fluffy hat is done and has been tested. It was fun to knit, and the yarn still feels like a cloud. It’s the second softest thing I have ever knitted. (The scarves in Malabrigo Rios were even softer, but not as fluffy.)

I had some doubts about its usability, and though I have indeed concluded that it won’t fill the gap I originally wanted to fill, it does fit in elsewhere. It feels perfect for windless days with temperatures around zero, which is what we’re having right now. The yarn has splashes of orange in it, so it goes with my orange shell jacket, as well as brown ones, so I can wear it with my brown winter coat as well. Not bad for an impulse buy.

The orange sweater feels great (the yarn is incredibly smooth!), looks great, and fits great. Except for the length. I made it a bit shorter than I usually make my sweaters, because I thought it looked good that way with the straight, slightly boxy fit. Now that I’m wearing it, though, it’s always riding up when I move around, and I don’t like the length.

You know what? I have everything that I need to make it fit better. With a hand-knit garment I have all the power. The leftover yarn is still in my knitting basket, and the 2.5mm needles are free. I even have that dash of late-night “just do it” recklessness to just pick out the last yarn end and rip back the ribbed bottom hem.

This summer I was gifted ~850 g of fine, white wool yarn. Since there’s so much of it, and it’s so elegantly fine and white, I had been thinking that it would make a lovely dress. Combined with some other colour so it doesn’t become a wedding dress – maybe knit sideways, with contrasting vertical stripes.

Then I made a gauge swatch, and the yarn turned out to be really stiff. Like, my gauge swatches stand up on their own, from just the natural curl of the knit fabric. It has no drape whatsoever. So a dress doesn’t seem like the best idea; it would look like cardboard.

Now I have a conundrum. How do I best use a yarn like this? Add mohair to give it some body and fluff? Go up in needle size to get a softer fabric and accept that it will be a bit see-through? Knit a sculpture instead of a garment?

I went to a local yarn shop. The visit did not go as planned.

My one goal was to buy a soft mid-weight yarn for a hat in a neutral-ish colour. Maybe like a nice hand-dyed grey or beige. Maybe they’d have something like the Malabrigo Rios I used for a pair of scarves but in a more subdued colourway.

(I need a hat to pair with my red leather jacket. My spring/autumn hat is red, and my gloves are red, and the overall impression of them all together is just way too red, so I need to break it up. And also, it is crazy that I am wearing my spring/autumn outerwear in January.)

Did I buy anything like that? Not at all. I came home with almost the opposite. Rosarios 4 Bulky Light Print is super bulky (not mid-weight) and definitely not a neutral colour. But it was so soft and I loved the colour so much.

I’ve never used a yarn even close to this kind of weight. You can’t really get a feel for it from the photo, I think – should have included a banana for scale. The hole in the middle of the knitting is the size of my fist, and each stitch is about the size of the nail of my little finger. Huge!

Using this yarn feels very different than my usual projects. It goes very fast, but also requires a whole other kind of attention than my usual knits; not something I could do while reading, for example. It’s nice to try something new! And I’ll get a hat out of it that definitely won’t be red. It remains to be seen whether I can wear it with the red jacket; it might be a bit too much. The sewing & crafts fair is coming up in a month, hopefully I’ll find an actual mid-weight hand-dyed grey yarn there.

I also bought material for a pair of felted slippers. I’ve never knitted anything with the intention of felting it, so that will also be entirely new.

The orange sweater is done.

Like almost all the sweaters I’ve made, there are things I like about it and things I don’t.

I like the fit and the construction of the Sweatrrr pattern, which is why I’m using it for the third time. It fits me perfectly around the neck and shoulders.

Just like last time I only used the basic construction and skipped the design elements. I used a simple 1×1 ribbing for the hem and cuffs and neckline this time. These came out really nice and tidy and look great.

The yarn is Monoceros by Apmezga, 100% hand-dyed merino. The overall colour is lovely, and the yarn feels very soft. It’s going to feel very comfortable to wear.

I’ve got mixed feelings about the yarn in the context of this sweater, though. The variegated colour worked out so-so. It led to ugly striping at first, and I did end up ripping back the body all the way to the start of the waist shaping and re-knitting without shaping. It fit better than I had expected; it drapes well enough that the boxier fit looks good on me.

The narrower, more even stripes on the re-knitted body aren’t bad. But because they’re not in sync with the width of the body, the stripes “travel”, so they end up looking slightly slanted. When I look at the sweater straight on, it looks like I’m not wearing it straight. I’m not sure what I think of that. And I’m not very fond of the abrupt transition from wide colour blotches on the shoulders to the super narrow striping on the sleeves.

Even though all four hanks of yarn were from the same dye lot, one was slightly different. It’s missing the smallest, darkest specks of brown. I didn’t see it before using the yarn – only when I switched from one hank to the next near the bottom of the sweater. Alternating two hanks didn’t help because it was not the abrupt transition that was problematic, but the fact that the skeins just didn’t match. I ripped that back and used the deviant hank for the sleeves, and now I can barely see the difference even when I’m looking for it.

Weaving in the ends of my latest knit sweater. I finished it last year already (ha ha) but I haven’t gotten around to finishing it. Very close now!

Leaving the house to give space to Ingrid and her friends for her birthday party, I went to the semi-annual crafts fair. Not intending to buy much, but I absolutely needed to visit Apmezga’s stand. For the last sweater I made with their yarn, I used three skeins of yarn and didn’t even wind the fourth one. I recklessly only brought three skeins for the current one. I’m almost at the end of the third skein and the sweater definitely isn’t finished. Unless I want a crop top. Which I don’t.

Apart from that, I bought a bag of wool felt scraps and some other assorted fabric off cuts. I don’t know what I’ll do with them, but they were pretty and cheap so why not.

And of course I always photograph interesting knitwear, for inspiration for future projects. Right know I’m thinking of knitting a sweater or cardigan with a round yoke. I’ve done seamed set-in sleeves, contiguous shoulders of two kinds, raglan sleeves both top-down and bottom-up, but not a round yoke, so I’m curious to try it out.

Adrian usually joins me in my corner of the sofa when it’s time for him to do homework. If his homework is reading, we read side by side. If he’s doing something more active, like practising his French vocabulary, that tends to collide with my reading, and I knit instead. Today his homework was knitting, so we actually knitted together.