My favourite socks are ready for wear again. One hole and one very thin place are now properly darned. That thin place could have done with a slightly larger mend but as usual I underestimated how much yarn I would need and ran out a bit too early.

I’m waiting for the yarn for my cardigan. Meanwhile I gave my restless hands a pair of socks to knit for Christmas.

Another swatch ahead of the planned new cardigan. I’ve decided on a yarn combination as well as a pattern. Now comes the hardest part: calculating gauge and adjusting all the stitch counts. I’m mentally already prepared for having to start, then rip it up and start over because the sizing will be off. Probably more than once. No matter how much I measure and calculate, reality always turns out different.

Trying to decide on the right yarn or yarns for my cardigan.

Left to right: Rauma Inca Alpakka (100% alpaca), Rauma Finull (100% wool), Sandnes Tynn Silk Mohair (57% mohair, 15% wool, 28% silk).

I made a swatch with the wool and mohair together, with a few different needle sizes. Then another with the wool on its own. I wasn’t quite satisfied with any of them. The wool and mohair combo was a bit too thick. The wool on its own – too scratchy. (At first when knitting with the wool and mohair together, I started wondering if the mohair made any difference at all. It’s so thin, doesn’t it get lost among all the wool? Feeling the two side by side removed all doubt.)

Maybe I should have tried some merino wool after all… When I felt the merino yarns in the shop, they all felt too smooth and bland, so I didn’t buy any. But perhaps it would have worked out together with the mohair?

Today I went and bought a ball of alpaca yarn and knitted yet another swatch with alpaca + mohair, and then one more with some leftover alpaca yarn from the green cardigan, again together with the mohair.

The alpaca/mohair combination is a clear winner. Softer than lambswool, fluffier than merino – so lovely to touch!

And in the photo it all just looks black.

Today I forced myself to get out of the house and cycle to a yarn shop on Söder. (I have enough flex hours accumulated that I can easily take half a day off when I want to.)

I want to knit another cardigan, so I need yarn. Sock yarn I can buy on the internet but a cardigan is a larger investment. I want to see the yarn up close and touch it before buying.

I’m planning to knit a black cardigan. Black. Unimaginative and perhaps a bit boring, yes. When I’m wearing a colourful skirt or a patterned dress, the rest of the outfit sometimes has to take a step back.

The yarn shop Litet Nystan was full of lovely yarns. The ones that my eyes and hands kept returning to were the colourful, variegated, hand-dyed ones. I will have to find a project for these, after the black cardigan.

Among the black yarns I couldn’t find any that quite felt like what I had in mind. The merino wools were too smooth and bland; the plain Swedish and Norwegian wools too thick and not soft enough. I came home with a wool yarn and a mohair blend that, when combined, will hopefully work out. The wool will provide thickness and body and the mohair will soften it.

I had a restaurant lunch (somewhat disappointing) and bought some mini Sarah Bernhardt cakes for myself, before spending almost an hour in the yarn shop and then cycling back home. By the time I was unlocking my bike again to head home, it was twilight.

It felt good to get out of the house and see and do something new. I needed this.

Spånga scout group has an “education week” every October, with nightly sessions on a variety of topics. I’ve never participated in the past, but this year – starved for experiences outside the home – I signed up for three sessions. (Hence also the slower pace of posting here.)

Two of the sessions were about wood carving. On Monday we went through the basics and practised a few techniques. Today we were handed fresh birch logs, axes and knives and let loose to carve anything we wanted.

You can’t do much in two hours, but it’s enough for a basic wooden spoon, which is what several other participants made. Or a butter knife, which is what I chose. A butter knife is a perfect first project because you can do it with just a simple carving knife, without any special tools.

The entire process was a lot of fun. Splitting the log again and again until I was left with thin enough pieces; picking a piece that fit the image in my head; using the axe to cut it roughly to shape. But the best part was the finest, slowest carving, carefully guiding the back of the knife with my thumb to cut off a small sliver to make the shape just so. I haven’t carved any actual object before, but I grew up with sharpening pencils “by hand”, using a knife rather than a sharpener. Having done that for decades, that basic carving grip is very familiar to my hands.

The timing was perfect, because I had just been thinking that we could do with one or two new butter knives in our kitchen. Butter knives actually wear out with time. One thinks of wood as a durable material, especially if it is only used on such soft things as butter and bread. But the blades do get smaller and smaller until the knives come to resemble sticks more than butter knives.

I’ll leave this one in its rustic state, with all the cuts visible, rather than sanding and polishing it. I like seeing the traces of my work.

Today we made chestnut creatures, as is our tradition. Adrian provided the chestnuts.

Intense concentration.

When we were poking around among the chestnuts in the bowl and commenting on the lack of choice, Adrian went off and came back with his school backpack, which contained at least another kilogram of chestnuts. Small, large, flattish or round – now we have lots of all sorts. They filled not just another bowl, but an entire large dish.

I was glad when Ingrid joined us. She’s been less interested in family activities recently. Teenagers, you know.

The naturalistic ones: camel, rabbit, hedgehog, pigeon, caterpillar.

The more fantastical ones: a sheep that can walk on water; a man with a triple jetpack.

And two space aliens.

I have no more scarf to knit, so I picked up a long-paused crocheting project to fill the gap.

This started out as a travelling project because it’s small and lightweight and easily transportable. If I left it as such, it would take years to finish, now that there is nearly no travelling going on…

It goes fast because there’s so much air in it. It’s mostly holes, after all. I guess it’s time to start planning the next project right away.

The scarf is finished, and it came out just as lovely as I had hoped and expected. This is one of my most successful knitting projects ever.

Now to wait for winter – and to look for a new project.

Sometimes a day goes by and fades into evening and I realize I haven’t done a single photo-worthy thing. I have sat at my desk, behind my computer. I have worked out (yes!) and read a bit of the Economist while eating lunch. I have cooked and eaten dinner. That’s it.

In the evening it is dark outside and I cannot take photos of anything in the garden. It is dark inside as well, and the rest of the family are all sitting in their dim corners of the house.

Occasionally this is enough to give me a gentle kick and make me do something physical that I can take a photo of. Which is backwards in a way – doing things just so I get a photo – but since these are things that I’ve been wanting to do anyway and simply procrastinating about, it’s not so backwards after all. The photo is just an odd kind of motivational carrot.

So this evening I darned a hole in a sock that has been waiting for my attention for a week or so.

It is sock darning season, because it is sock wearing season. The house usually starts getting cold enough for socks in the middle of the day around mid-September.

This fresh darning looks crisp and smart compared to the ones I did half a year ago. Almost too crisp, in fact: it doesn’t blend in. The older ones have become slightly felted by wear (even though the darning yarn is a wool mix rather than pure wool) and look a lot more cosy and natural.

It’s nearly always the spot under the big toe that wears out first on my indoor socks.