Cardigan is done. It’s just the ends left to weave in, and then to find buttons for it.

Mirror selfie.

The back of the neck on this cardigan is too tight, like I suspected. Rip up and redo.

Yes, Eric offered to take a photo if it for me, but this was more fun.

On weekdays, I simply knit. Sometimes I have more attention to give to the work, sometimes less. But I generally don’t deal with complications, like measuring or making important decisions. Those are for weekends.

Yesterday I blocked this half-done cardigan to see if it might fit. The gauge swatch I knitted relaxed a lot when wetted, so I wanted to check this one before continuing with fiddly bits like buttonholes and sleeves. Seems OK, although I’m not sure about the neckline construction, or the width of the sleeves. I have to finish the neckline before I can reasonably evaluate it, though, and same for the sleeves.

I invested in a set of foam mats for blocking, instead of pinning things to folded-up bath towels. Felt very nice, much more stable and easy to work with.

There are KnitPro foam mats you can buy for about 400 kr. You can hear from the name alone how pro they would be. Or you can buy a children’s play mat, identical in size and material, for half the price.

The green sock on the left is my last sock with a standard-shaped toe. The gray sock on the right is one of my many socks shaped after my own foot.

After quite some time of use, the green sock has stretched to fit the foot decently well. But it never feels quite as comfortable as the custom-shaped ones. There is extra material where none is needed, while other places are stretched. It’s quite visible: the stitches are stretched thin over the big toe, which is where I’m sure the sock will wear out first, and the vertical columns of stitches lean.

I keep the green pair out of some kind of nostalgia, and sometimes I put them on because I like the colour, but they can’t compete with the better socks, so they mostly remain in the drawer.

I happened to read a horror story on a knitting forum from someone who had knitted a whole sweater and then discovered that the yarn relaxed a lot when it got wet, so their sweater grew over 10 centimetres in size in both length and width. They were desperately looking for ways to rescue it, with ideas ranging from just ripping it all up, to forcing it to shrink by tumble-drying it, to cutting off 10 cm from the sleeves and knitting new cuffs.

Theirs was knit in a superwash merino yarn, and I am also using a superwash merino yarn for the sweater I’m knitting, and one that’s unfamiliar to me so I’m not entirely sure how it will behave when washed. I think my knitting is tight enough that it can’t possibly grow by as much as theirs did, but I don’t want to end up with an unwearable garment. So I wet blocked the yoke that I’ve knit thus far, just to be on the safe side.

It grew in width from 31.5 cm to 33, which is a rounding error in my eyes, so all is good. Phew.

I try to keep some kind of easy knitting or crochet project at hand, even on office days. I don’t pick them up every day, but when I don’t bring one, I often end up regretting it. Yesterday I ended up waiting for a slow build pipeline way too many times with nothing to occupy myself with, because my easy crocheting project got complications, and it was frustrating. Luckily I usually have multiple projects ongoing at the same time, so today I grabbed the bag with my large fluffy shawl instead, even though it’s a bit too bulky for a travel project. And was very glad I’d done it, because on my way home the commuter train got stuck for 15 minutes just before Sundbyberg (the station before Spånga) and I was glad to have something at hand.

This sweater is knitting up unbelievably fast.

On the one hand, it goes really fast. I started a day ago, and I have definitely not spent all day knitting, but already I have half the yoke done. I’m starting to understand how people can knit a sweater in a week.

On the other hand, it gobbles up yarn like there’s no tomorrow. This is a full 50 g skein of yarn gone, in a day.

On the third hand, this yarn is about a third of the price of the hand-dyed merino wool I’ve used before.

In addition to my purchases yesterday, I also bought some yarn from a local yarn shop here in Spånga for a brown cardigan.

This yarn is thicker than anything I’ve used for a sweater before, and the label recommended 6 mm needles. The largest “normal” needles I had were 5 mm, so I knitted up a swatch with those first, but I did want to do another with the recommended needle size.

The only 6 mm needles I had were these old wooden ones, that I’ve only used for teaching Ingrid and Adrian to knit. They were like sticks in my hands, and I felt like I was play-acting knitting. I didn’t like the look of the result, either – it was floppy and thin – so luckily I’ll be using the more normal 5 mm needles for the cardigan itself.

My hands, and myself, are starting to feel restless in meetings again. I haven’t done any meeting knitting for months, but now I feel the need again. I take it as a sign that I’m settled in at my new project, no longer flailing around and struggling to keep up. Things feel stable and safe.

I want to knit a dress, and some more cardigans for the winter wouldn’t hurt, but those require planning and designing, neither of which I have the mental energy for right now. I just want to knit. So it’ll be a shawl. Large enough to keep me busy; interesting enough to be fun; simple enough to work as a background task.

I find it tricky to plan a knitting project. If I pick a pattern first, I might not find a suitable yarn for it. If I pick a yarn first, I don’t know how much to buy. I want to see the yarn colour in person, and touch it, before making a decision. If I pick a pattern and then swap out the yarn for something close enough, I’ll need a different amount than what the pattern specifies. So I end up trying to keep a whole bunch of patterns in my head while looking at all the yarns, and trying to choose both at the same time, and struggling to make any decision at all.

Shawls are easier than most projects because the sizing really doesn’t matter much. I went to my favourite local yarn store, browsed for a yarn that looked nice and felt nice, found one that was on sale, and bought a bunch, assuming that there were bound to be shawl patterns that call for two colours of yarn. Ravelry didn’t let me down, and now I’m knitting a nice two-colour brioche pattern.

The Multiverse pattern is really clever in its simplicity. After the first few setup rows, it’s just brioche, but with 2 increases (branchings) on each right-side row with the leading colour, wherever you like. There’s no pattern to read, which makes it perfect for background knitting, but there are always decisions to be made, which keeps it interesting.

I really like the subtle tonality of my yarns. Looking at the knitting you almost can’t see that there are two colours – it just looks like light and shadow. But the shadowed parts would not look as shadowed at all if they were also knit in the lighter yarn.