1 finished pair of socks: 48 grams.
Leftover yarn: 54 grams.
I can get a whole other pair of socks out of that, which is so much better than having yarn for almost-but-not-quite a pair and then having to make up the difference with something else.

The cardigan is nearly finished. Today I got the yoke done and could try it on in its finished shape. There are details left, such as a collar and a button band, and various seams to finish, but the overall shape is there. And it fits! I had to do so much guessing about the numbers when I started the yoke that I was mentally fully prepared to have to redo all of it. That’s why the orange lifelines are there, to make it easier to frog the yoke down to each of those lines. But it actually looks like I got it right.

Nystagmus of course interpreted the cardigan as a combination cat bed and toy. He’s been uninterested in my knitting most of the time, which I’m rather relieved about – pop culture had led me to expect him to attack any and all yarn immediately, which he doesn’t. But when yarn happens to dangle right in front of him, or when fluffy things are laid out on the floor, he wants them for himself.

The cardigan has reached the point where all the pieces come together and make up a cardigan-shaped object, albeit incomplete. The end goal is not quite in sight yet but sort of on the horizon at least. And the part that is finished actually fits decently well!

This is, unfortunately, also one of those points where difficult decisions need to be made regarding size and gauge and adjustments, because reality is annoyingly not matching up with the pattern. I love the knitting but I really hate those times where I know that taking the wrong route may lead to frogging weeks’ worth of work and then spending an hour swearing while I try to get the stitches back on the needles.

I’ve now learned about the concept of lifelines which will reduce that swearing at least. So now my work is a complicated tangle of all sorts of components: not only the cardigan itself, the two balls of yarn and the needles, but also the lifeline, temporary holders for underarm stitches, and stitch markers. Just getting it all out of my basket and unbundling it all is a bit of a project, every time I pick it up to start working on it.

Ingrid’s favourite pair of shoes needed mending. A fleece patch and some superglue, and they’re wearable again.

I’ve come to realize that polyester fleece is the ultimate mending material for any kind of textiles – clothes, shoes, bags and so on. I’ve even used it to mend laundry baskets. It is durable, comes in many colours, doesn’t fray, has a little bit of stretch to it but is still stable, and is easy to sew. I know polyester has its shortcomings (like spreading microplastics) but nothing else compares. Which is the case for many plastics, isn’t it.

Here’s the yarn I was looking at yesterday. Hand-dyed soft merino wool in all sorts of beautiful colours. Suddenly I’m very motivated to finish the cardigan I’m knitting.

I knitted nine pairs of fine wool socks in a variety of colours last years. Together with a few pairs from other sources, this is enough for sock-sufficiency. I can’t remember the last time I wore a pair of cotton socks.

The yarn for the pink ones at the top of the pile was a bit of a wild card. It looked different in the photo – the yellows and whites were more prominent – and when I saw it in reality, I wasn’t even sure if I’d use the yarn at all. On a whim I still knitted up a pair of socks, because why not. Now they’re one of my favourites. Well, many of them are my favourites, but the pink ones are my happy socks. They look like candy, I thought at first, but I’m not that much into candy really. So now I think of them as the colour of summer flowers – dahlias and cosmos.

The diseased tiger socks are still weird but they’ve grown on me as well.

There’s still room for more. I wouldn’t mind a few more variegated yarns, and a proper red. Maybe a pure orange as well. I had my eyes on some beautiful hand-dyed yarns on Instagram but then I realized that they’re all made in Britain. With Brexit, I’d get hit with VAT and customs fees and what not, and the yarns are not worth that. Damn Brits and their silly Brexit.

I knit socks during meetings where I’m mostly a passive participant, to help me remain focused and not just zone out or get distracted by reddit or something. At one point I told my teammates, in case they were wondering about my unusual movements.

One of them jokingly said something about knitting a pair for him next. Size 46. Well, joke’s on him, because he’ll be getting a pair of woollen socks for Christmas, in a nice self-striping yarn with a goodly proportion of dark Urb-it green in it.

Size 46 is huge. It’s going to be hard to get the sizing right because I have no feet of that size available to try the socks on. Eric has size 42 and that’s what a pair of normal adult male feet look like in my mind. The step from his feet to size 46 is as large as the step from Adrian’s 11-year-old feet to Eric’s.

Of course I’m doing this rather last minute as usual. But I’ve got the entire weekend ahead of me still.

I finally found a use for the pouch I made in my embroidery course last winter. It had been languishing in a cupboard until now.

It turned out to be the perfect size for a crafts pouch, for bringing my sock knitting with me on my days of working in the office. It is just large enough for a 50-gram ball of yarn, a half-finished sock, and a circular needle. And it makes me much happier to look at than some industrially-produced packing bag, although one of those would probably weigh less and perhaps be more practical. So it is now part of my standard going-to-office kit, together with my mouse with its pad, a conference speaker/microphone, a web camera, and other assorted office equipment.

We carved pumpkins.

Ingrid is the artistically inclined one in the family and has spent hours not just drawing and painting but intentionally practising both. Unsurprisingly she took this way more seriously than I did. She created something with actual artistic merit, whereas I just went for a low-effort design. But honestly I was mostly here to get the project started and provide some company. I think I spent more time with my camera than with the knife.

Adrian drew a toothy design that he then realized he wouldn’t be able to realize, which upset him. He went off to his room for a while to calm down and finished his carving later, on his own and in peace and quiet.

Python code beaten into submission, another pair of socks finished. A good day at work.

90% of the code we have at Urb-it is .NET. Whenever I have to work with any of the remaining 10%, it takes hours to even get started. It took me three hours on my own, and then another two hours together with two more developers, to get the python project to build and run on my computer. Even though I’ve done it before on that same computer. Some damn package gets updated somewhere and boom, there goes my afternoon. But that was yesterday, so today was pure productivity.