I try to hold back with the knitting posts because I imagine you all get tired of them, but now I see the last progress photo of the cardigan was six weeks ago, so I can get away with one.

I had planned a colour fade which looked good when the yarns were still in hanks, but now that I’m knitting it, there is less gradual fading than I had hoped and more of a striped effect.

The fade is much softer and, you know, actually fade-y, on the reverse of the fabric. I’m starting to understand why so many of the knitting patterns that incorporate a colour fade are made in reverse stockinette or garter stitch. But I still like the overall impression of the right side much better – the colours look more brilliant and the yarn more lustrous. So I guess I’ll have to deal with the stripey fade.

Devilled eggs, herring of various kinds, fake vegetarian herring, and assorted side dishes.

Pasha with raspberry coulis.

Painted Easter eggs. My mum and I manage stylized but recognizable objects, and pretty patterns. Adrian does his own thing. Ingrid is the only one who actually practices painting and therefore makes more and more impressive designs each year, with just 8 crappy colours.

My cardigan-to-be looks like a geometry puzzle, not like a cardigan-to-be. Like a middle school maths problem, where you get two measurements and have to calculate all the rest, or something.

Much of the yarn I buy comes in hanks, so I’m often winding it into balls. Everybody on the internet says to buy a yarn winder and a yarn swift, but I really enjoy doing this by hand. It’s meditative. And the yarn feels nice. And it reminds me of my grandmother.

I remember holding up hanks of yarn for her to wind. I remember seeing her use a yarn swift in her home in town, but she probably didn’t bring it with her to her summer cottage, so I had to do its job when she was there. And she taught me how to hand-wind yarn into a soft, squishy ball, so it keeps its elasticity, by winding it over my fingers.

I loop my hank over an IKEA step stool instead of children’s hands.

Here’s the beginning of my next knitted cardigan. I browsed a lot of patterns and had an idea of what I wanted, but couldn’t find any pattern that delivered on all my requirements, so it’s going to be a mash-up of Nala but with a different gauge and probably without the cables, and probably some ribbing along the sides like Fade-It Brioche and this faded cardigan. And as for the colour fade, I guess I’ll just wing it.

I am approaching a point (or maybe I’ve even already reached it) where it doesn’t make much sense to knit more socks. I have lots of wonderful, woolly socks now. Not quite in all imaginable colours yet, but close. I can’t remember when I last wore a pair of plain, black, store-bought cotton socks. I also can’t see myself doing so in a foreseeable future. But I don’t want to stop. I can make room for more knitted socks in my sock drawer if I pack away the cotton ones to the basement.

I can also keep the drawer from filling up by knitting socks for others. Adrian is always happy about more socks, and I found these beautiful, crazy yarns that almost seem made for him. Zauberball Crazy – colour gradient yarns in brilliant hues with no repeating pattern. Four socks from one ball, and nothing repeats.

I wonder how they even make these yarns. Are they actually random, or are they carefully designed to appear random? How do they wind the balls so tidily, with the colours so clearly separated? Has this company invented not only a unique way to dye yarns, but also a matching machine to wind them?

Among my errands on Wednesday I bought buttons for the black cardigan. This allowed me to finish it by knitting the button band and buttonholes.

Overall it came out really nice. The lace looks pretty and has good definition even in the black, fuzzy yarn. The fit is good, my pattern tweaks mostly worked out, and it feels super soft and fuzzy without being too warm. I already started wearing it before I had the buttons in place because it’s just so cosy.

There’s some bunching around the armholes – I had to go up several sizes for the sleeves (this was clearly sized for ladies with twiggy arms) and it wasn’t easy to adjust the raglan shoulder shaping to fit them in.

I did plan to go yarn shopping yesterday, but I was only going to buy a single hank, just for swatching. After swatching I was going to measure and plan and think, and only then would I go back to buy yarn for real. Instead I came home with the materials for an entire cardigan.

I had my sights set on Tosh Merino Light, a luxuriously soft yarn in the most brilliant hand-dyed colours. Kind of expensive, but hey, the last cardigan I knitted took me a year, and 1500 kronor or so for a year’s entertainment is pretty good value for money.

To my shock I saw that there was only a single hank left of the colourway I loved most (Tosh Merino Light – Carolina Reaper). The yarn is made in the US, so ordering more would mean unpredictable weeks of waiting, which I didn’t feel like, at all.

So I grabbed that single hank and designed my next cardigan project around it on the spot. Together with three matching colours it fit into a yellow-orange-red fade. Which means the pattern should be seamless (to make that fade work) and relatively pared-down, with none of the lacy or textured patterns I’ve been considering. Constraints always make decisions easier.

My black cardigan is more or less finished. I steam blocked it today, and later also added a collar and a button band. The only thing missing is the buttonhole band, which I cannot make without buttons, because I don’t know how many or how large the buttonholes will need to be. But I can’t wait to start using the cardigan because it is so incredibly soft and comfy, so I’ll just pretend for a short while that it’s meant to be worn unbuttoned.

Sewed a grocery shopping bag to give away as a birthday present. It has a very subtle machine-embroidered letter “k” that I now see is nearly invisible in the photo, despite being quite large.

I expected this project to take about an hour, but it took almost exactly twice as long. I even did some estimating – and was still way off.

Measure, cut, sew edges, sew edges once more for an enclosed seam, pin top hem, sew top hem, measure handles, cut handles, sew handles, attach handles. 10 steps, say 5 minutes each, that’s 50 minutes, round up to an hour.

The zigzag embroidered letter was a last-minute afterthought, but that wasn’t the thing that made the whole project take so much longer than expected. No, it was totally ordinary work that I had simply not accounted for – some of which I might have expected if I had planned more carefully, and some that came out of nowhere.

Ironing the fabric (and setting up the ironing board, and waiting for the iron to heat up, etc etc). Piecing together one of the faces of the bag out of two separate pieces because the fabric scraps I had were too oddly shaped. Folding the top hem, twice, in a stiff fabric. Measuring for the placement of the handles. Fighting with the sewing machine when sewing over the place where the handles attach to the body of the bag and there are like seven layers of fabric to punch through. Refilling the bottom bobbin when it ran out of thread. Fighting with the machine again when it made crazy tangles after I replaced the bobbin, because the top thread had gotten out of one of the hooks it needs to run through, without me noticing.

Estimating is hard. It’s a good thing I was in no hurry. The birthday in question isn’t until Sunday – oodles of time left! – so this didn’t matter at all. And the end result looks pretty nice, even though it’s not very photogenic.