The sleeves are all done and finished, and they fit. Now I’ve just got the bottom hem left – and all the ends to weave in. Almost there! I might be finished with the whole cardigan before the end of the year.

One more last-minute knitted Christmas ornament to give away, this time with an elephant pattern.

These balls were really quick and easy to make, and quite a lot of fun. Just four pattern repeats, so I’m done with it before the work has time to start feeling repetitive.

We decorated gingerbread cookies. Ingrid and I decorated hearts and trees and pigs. Adrian made bleeding sharks, stitched-up crocodiles, and Frankenstein’s monster with parts of different gingerbread men glued together.


Then he went on to even more innovative creations, like a two-headed giraffe, a tangle of teddy bears, and 3D dolphins.

In the evening we decorated the tree. Unpacking the decorations is the best part: “remember when we got this one!” and “oh, I’d forgotten about this one”.

So apparently 14°C is the point where my hands get noticeably cold.

Outdoors I normally don’t need gloves until the temperature gets to around 10°C – that’s my usual “hat and glove” point. But then I’m walking, moving my arms and moving the blood around, and not holding a cold piece of plastic like a computer mouse. Sitting still and mousing around feels much colder.

It’s 14°C inside and –14°C outside and that’s probably as cold as it will get here this winter – the weather will get warmer for sure (this is well below average for a Stockholm winter), the electricity prices will go down perhaps not to normal but to at least less painful levels, and we’re getting a heat pump installed today. But a pair of fingerless typing gloves could still be useful to have later as well.

I have a standard sock pattern that works well for my feet, and only needs minor adjustments for Adrian’s. It’s barely modified from a standard pattern that I found for free on the internet. I thought gloves might be the same – but the standard glove pattern that most websites have didn’t fit my hands at all. When I made the thumb gusset long enough to reach from the base of the thumb to the split between thumb and palm, the thumb itself came out ridiculously wide.

So it’s back to that most common of knitting techniques: ripping it all up and redoing it. The glove on the left is my second, better fitting attempt; the one on the right I just started ripping up.

I’m still puzzled about the patterns all being so off. When I asked for thumb gusset shaping advice on Reddit, the responders all unanimously said that what I thought was the standard, was not. I should increase on every 3rd round, they said, not every 2nd – which the websites and books all had told me to do.

We’ve had the opportunity to borrow a giant Lego Taj Mahal set – larger than we’d be willing to pay for ourselves – and now we’re building it. Mostly Adrian, but I’m also helping out.

Mostly I help by sorting pieces. There’s something satisfying about it. Both about the sorting itself, and about the end result, and about knowing that Adrian has a good point to start from.

Beige; yellow; all other colours. Mid-sized white pieces (at least three units long and full height), small white pieces, flat white pieces, large stick-like white pieces, and a whole separate bowl with dozens of turntable pieces for the tiled floor.

The book with knitting patterns had some with cats, so I had to make another Christmas ball.

Slightly glittery yarn in red and white seemed suitably Christmassy, but now that the ball is done, the cats look like demons with blood-red eyes and bloody paws.

Last year I got a book with traditional Scandinavian knitting patterns as a gift from a colleague. I had already been thinking of reciprocating with something knitted, based on a pattern from that book. Now that this year’s Christmas gift is “something hand-knitted”, I just have to. Except he already got a pair of socks from me last year, and repeating that would be too boring. And other garments and accessories are hard to gift when I don’t know what he needs. I couldn’t come up with anything better than a Christmas ornament, so I knitted a ball. It came out nicer than I had hoped for. I like the concept and I think I might make more, for other people and perhaps also for our own tree.

Every year since 1988, the Swedish Retail Institute has announced a “Christmas gift of the year” – a product that somehow embodies the zeitgeist for that year. Apparently it is based on “an independent analysis of consumption trends” but it’s probably just some group’s fingers in the air.

Sometimes they capture the beginning of a trend, or the introduction of a product that stays. The CD player in 1992, a cookbook in 2002 when cookbooks were starting to be hip, a flat-screen TV in 2004. Sometimes they zoom in on a temporary madness – the spiky acupressure mat in 2009, a juicer in 2013, VR goggles in 2016.

In 2020, the camping stove got to embody the Swedish people’s new-found love for the outdoors, triggered by the covid quarantine; in 2021 an event ticket symbolized the end of the quarantine.

Anyway, it’s a bit of fun, even though I’ve never let it affect my actual choices of Christmas gifts.

Until this year. The Christmas gift of the year for 2022 is a home-knitted garment. Inflation is high, and so are electricity costs. There is a war going on, and people in bombed-out cities are without heating or electricity. The world feels like a chilly place. People want something to warm them, both in body and heart. And home-made crafts, which used to be something for grannies and oddball hippie activists, are suddenly trendy again.

I have a cardigan to finish, and I really hadn’t planned to knit any more socks right now, but I couldn’t pass up this opportunity. So there will be some socks under the tree this year again. I did half a sock today, just in meetings or while reading – thicker yarn makes the work go fast – so I can easily get some done before Christmas.

I always wear out the elbows on my cardigans. I am very aware of it when I’m wearing any of my hand-knitted cardigans, and try to keep my elbows off my desk, but I’m sure I’ll still end up wearing through them.

I’ve sewn on leather patches on two of my cardigans. For this one I didn’t think the leather look would be a good match, and I find it difficult to get ordinary darning to look even in larger sizes, so I looked for an alternative. (Good thing I have books about mending.)

One of the books described Scotch darning as a good fit for elbows – sturdy and hard-wearing. It’s effectively blanket stitch over weft yarn. I tried it out and it came out really well, if I say so myself. Sturdy and even.

What I discovered, and wish the book had told me, was that the weft threads should have more distance between them than for normal darning. Because effectively you’ll be fitting another thread in every gap between the weft threads. Mine ended up too densely packed and I sometimes had to stitch around two of them at the same time, to fit my stitches in. I ended up with some thicker wales here and there, but you can’t see it from a distance.

And it took so much yarn! That’s why there are so many ends to weave in. I had small hanks of embroidery wool specifically for mending, one of which was a lucky colour match for the cardigan, and it ran out just as I finished. I used up the whole hank for this one patch. I could have done another row if I’d had more yarn, where the fabric is thin but not quite worn through yet.

I attended beginners’ class in freeform crochet today. It was less structured than the embroidery course and more just “let’s try a few things”.

I think the longer format of the embroidery course suited me better – it gave me enough time to actually get a feeling for the process, what directions it could be taken and what angles I could try. But this was also fun. I’m already getting ideas for projects.

The outcome of an evening of freeform crocheting looks much messier than the result of an evening’s embroidery.