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.

Continuing on my extra-everything skirt decorations. For this blue piece I’m echoing the printed silk fabric in embroidered wool. Mostly satin stitch, with borders in back stitch. I have no violet yarn in the right colour and quality, but I felt the design wouldn’t be complete without the violet, so those are small applique pieces.

Embroidered embellishments for a wool skirt.

I was originally aiming to let the embroidery on each curved piece follow its shape and contours. For the larger pieces, I thought latticework would be a better way to fill the surface. And now, when I was starting this latest large blue one, I couldn’t let go of the idea of echoing some of the dotted pattern from the silk fabric. So my originally quite contained design is now sprawling all over the place. Extra everything.

I hope, but I’m not entirely sure, that it’ll work out when I assemble it all. Hopefully the colours and the similar shapes are enough to keep it all together – or maybe it’ll be a messy jumble of disparate parts. Maybe it’s time to try it out, even though not all the parts are finished.

The good thing is that it’s all entirely modular, and I should be able to easily get more of the fabrics, if needed. If I don’t like it, I can discard any parts that don’t work – use them for something else – and make new ones with a different design.

Four years after getting a new kitchen, I still think happy thoughts about it at least monthly. I’ve got well-organized storage space, I’ve got comfortable counter space, I’ve got outlets everywhere. And I’ve got pretty things in the kitchen: salt jars and utensil jars and towels and pot holders.

There is just one ugly thing in the middle of all the nice stuff, and that’s the folded-up paper towels under the oil bottles to catch any drips.

Well, now that ugly thing is finally no more. Instead I have decent quilted coasters under them now. I happened to look at the paper towels and couldn’t stand them any more, and made coasters out of scrap fabric then and there. It would probably have taken me less time and fewer mistakes if I hadn’t undertaken the project late at night, but I just wanted the problem solved.

With some careful measuring and piecing, I got two double-sided coasters out of an eight-centimetre strip of a curtain fabric sample. That almost deserves some kind of prize.

Basic hand embroidery is so simple that anyone can do it, as long as you have somewhat decent eyesight and hand-eye coordination, and can follow along a basic tutorial in your preferred medium. If you can thread a needle, and make that needle go through fabric more or less where you intended, you can do it.

Achieving something that you’re happy with can be harder. Some skill gaps you can work around, or ignore. Nobody else likes the colour combinations you choose? Who cares. Don’t like drawing? Stitch based on someone else’s design. Can’t keep your stitches and edges even? Stay away from formal styles and go for a more relaxed design with looser, more random stitches.

Or you can choose to lean into the gap and practise until you get better. I like a tidy, more formal look, but getting my stitches all straight and of equal length and at equal distance is hard. In some lucky situations I can measure things – I wouldn’t try to set down the basic lattice for latticework just by eyeballing distances. But that doesn’t work for basic stitching.

And even with the lattice being all at right angles and equal distances, I found it was still entirely possible to mess it up when it was time to couch it down at the crossing points. A millimetre here and a millimetre there, and the whole grid looked wonky. I ripped out all the small stitches and now I’m redoing them.

Practise, practise, and more practise.

This cardigan is going on to its third or fourth life. We got it from my sister-in-law when her kids outgrew it. Neither Ingrid nor Adrian were too fond of knitted cardigans, so we passed it on to a friend. Now it came back, far outgrown again, and unfortunately with a moth-eaten hole on one side.

I like colourful mends, but sometimes a discreet approach works better. I’ve been watching Instagram reels about mending knitwear and learned how to basically recreate the knit fabric. Now I got to try it out for real. It starts out as duplicate stitch around the edges of the hole, where the original material is still whole, and then just continues out into the nothingness with pins for temporary support. The gray wool I had at home was a near-perfect match so the end result is almost indistinguishable from the original fabric (although just a bit thicker, so you can feel it more than you can see it).

Now the cardigan can be passed along to the next baby cousin.

I forgot to take a “before” picture so here’s one from mid-mend and one of the finished result.

Picked up the embroidery project again after a pause due to travelling and such. It’s coming along nicely. The initial lack of plan has now gelled into at least a sense of direction. Shape-wise mostly following the contours of the shapes. Combining most if not all colours on each piece to tie them together. That one latticework piece will need a companion to make sure it doesn’t look out of place.

I like the look and feel of the couched lines with the thick purple yarn, but I don’t want it to take over. Perhaps I need another project that focuses on couching stitch.

I finished the shawl I’ve been knitting – since January, apparently. But really it’s been mostly finished for well over a month, if not more. I just needed to add the last bit of edging, bind off, weave in the ends and block. Which, in a burst of productivity, I finally finished today. Feels good.

Sprayed and pinned to towel-covered sofa cushions for blocking. Naturally Nysse saw this as a chance to appropriate the whole thing as yet another cat bed.

The shawl is based on the Early Blossoms pattern on Ravelry. I liked the pattern. It was easy to follow, perfect as background knitting, and easy to adjust – I think I added one extra red patch and made another one slightly larger. And the result is pretty stylish.

Even with blocking, mine didn’t come out strictly triangular, which I think may have been the original intent. Perhaps I could force it into shape but I don’t want to be too forceful with the alpaca yarn. And it really won’t matter since I’m going to be draping it over my shoulders anyway.

I’m taking a break from this towel for now. The darning has been meditative and soothing but the holes are all mended now and it’s time to switch to some other project. It’ll be interesting to see what it feels like in use. The darns are stiffer than the rest of it, naturally, but I’m hoping they will soften with washing and using.

As usual, I’m getting started without fully knowing where I want to end up.

Detailed plans are not for me. I can’t do weekly meal plans; I don’t have daily plans for our vacation trips; I don’t have a design for the garden; I don’t draw up plans for software I write. I have a direction, and ideas about what I might like, and more detailed ideas about the first few steps, and the rest will come later when I know more. Trying to make a detailed plan usually just ends up paralysing me with anxiety.

I semi-randomly assigned colours/fabrics to the shapes I had drawn, with no more thought than making sure that I didn’t get two of the same colour next to each other. Outlined them, and started embroidering on the first one with lattice stitch.