Adrian’s most recent project from crafts lessons at school – a wooden lamp. A really cool design, and very precisely executed.

Do I need more socks? Most definitely not.

Do I need to knit more socks? I sort of do. Socks are the best background knitting project I’ve found, for meetings, commuting, waiting for the code to build and deploy, etc. Small, portable, simple. And the end result is useful – I’ll have more use for more socks than I will for hats or scarves.

I’ve got lots of sock yarn left over from socks I’ve already knitted. Most sock yarn is sold in hanks of 100 grams. That’s should be roughly enough for two pairs of socks, with my sizing.

Knitting two pairs of identical socks does not feel ideal. I’d have to be mindful of which one goes with which, to ensure that each pair fades and wears evenly. No: either all socks are the same and you just pick two at random, like I did with my old black cotton socks, or all pairs are unique and pairing up socks after a wash becomes trivial.

I’ll just do simple combinations of two colours at a time, I thought.

Surprisingly, even though each of these yarns individually resulted in lovely socks, pairing them up two and two led to more bad combinations than good ones. They all tended to be just slightly off. The reds don’t go well together; the light grey is too warm to fit with the slightly blue-toned dark grey. The muted green, which I thought would balance and complement the light candy, instead just made it muddy. It becomes obvious that they’re all sourced from different dyers and don’t belong to the same palette.

Buy some neutrals to combine them with? Do I really want to be adding to this pile, though?

Closing session for the embroidery club for this season, with a mini-exhibition and a potluck meal.

I almost managed to finish mounting my work in time, but gave up at midnight yesterday and left the last bits until later.

All done with the Stockholm embroidery! Needs better lighting to do it proper justice, though.

Staple guns are strangely satisfying to work with.

Working on my green organza tetraptych, hoping to get it to a presentable state in the week that’s left before our embroidery club’s last meet-up of the season. It would feel nice to have it finished. (The Stockholm embroidery will be fully finished and mounted this weekend, as soon as I get my delivery of linen backing fabric.)

I like embroidery projects where I can let the design emerge as I go. I have an overall concept or idea, but no detailed design sketches. I do a bit, let that marinate, do a bit more, look at what I have and consider what more might be needed. An incremental, intuitive approach. Sometimes I don’t even have a real plan for what I’ll do with the yarn I’ve threaded my needle with. I just know that there will be something with this yarn in roughly this area. Only when I have it in my hands and start stitching does the design coalesce.

Sometimes the yarn or the fabric decides the details. When my hank of green thread ends, then that’s where the couching ends. When I want a piece of the silk fabric, if I have an existing scrap piece with roughly the right characteristics, then I take that, instead of imagining some sort of ideal and trying to find it in a larger piece – and the scrap piece can then set the tone for its surroundings.

A deadline was exactly what was needed. I had all the materials – all I needed was a nudge, and a whole lot of patience.

First: pinning. With lots and lots of pins. Note to self: don’t try to do this wearing a knitted sweater, because those pins catch on everything.

Stretched and pinned to a sheet of foam board, it’s already looking nice:

Lacing it from the reverse side.

You really don’t want any knots in the lacing thread, because they make it near impossible to tighten the lacing, so I ended up working with 5-meter pieces of thread. Trying to keep them from tangling was an exercise in patience.

It reminded me of an old Estonian folk tale, where Clever Hans and Old Nick were both going to sew something. Probably Hans challenging Old Nick, as he often did. Old Nick had thick and clumsy fingers, so he asked Hans to thread a needle for him. Hans threaded his own needle with a normal length of thread. For Old Nick, he first gave a very short piece, and when he complained, gave him a very long piece so he had to run back and forth across the yard for each stitch. I felt like old dumb Nick with my long piece of thread here.

Even with all my stretching and blocking, there’s a tiny bit of puckering in the blue background fabric. It’s only noticeable with the light coming from the side and putting the puckers in relief. When it’s hanging on the wall, I’m sure it won’t even be noticeable. For the photo at the top, I turned it with the long edge towards the window, and that already made a difference.

Now I want to frame it on a green background fabric. That’ll be a project for next weekend, when the fabric has arrived.

My Stockholm-themed embroidery has been finished, more or less, since a burst of concerted effort ahead of the workshop at the end of March. Since then I’ve been working with the printed fabrics we made in that workshop, and the Stockholm piece has been languishing in a bag.

The embroidery club has its last session for the season in two weeks, and we vaguely discussed that we should bring the works we’ve finished this season, show them off a little bit.

Realizing that I haven’t actually finished anything, I set myself a new deadline. I will finish mounting the Stockholm piece, and I will make an effort to finish and mount the green prints plus organza series as well.

Step one: block and stretch the piece. It turns out that, even though I had a grid to work off, it’s somehow become slanted nevertheless. Fitting it into a rectangular frame like this would be difficult.

Thus, step zero point five: add a narrow wedge of bushes and walls and water to the edge to square it off. It doesn’t blend in 100%, especially the shadow on the water, but nobody’s going to be looking that closely at the edges.

Continuing with my tetraptych of organza over hand-printed green fabric. Trying out different ways of layering the organza. The first one was a flat layer of organza over printed silk; on the second I tried folding the organza; on the third one I bunched it up and stitched it down more randomly. Photos really don’t do that one justice.

I think the silk needs to make a come-back in the fourth one, to bring it all together, and the purple could be more present in #2 and #3, for the same reason. And they all need a bit more in general (possibly with the exception of the first one).

Many sweater knitting patterns suggest an even rate of decreases from just below the armhole to just above the wrist. On close-fitting garments, that often makes the sleeves too tight for me around the biceps. Instead I tend to knit straight until just above the elbow and only then start decreasing.

That bit worked well this time, as expected, but I wasn’t happy with the decrease rate afterwards. Too steep. Rip it up and do it again.

With a slightly thicker yarn and a slightly looser knit than I generally tend to choose, the cardigan almost knits itself. And when I change my mind, unravelling and re-doing a section is a piece of cake. With loose-ish stitches, there’s room for me to insert a thin cable needle in a row further down in advance, before I even start ripping it up. No need to painstakingly find and pick up the stitches afterwards. Re-knitting it takes an hour at most.

Easter in Uppsala with my mum, as per tradition. She and the kids all like traditions and doing things the way they have always been done; makes me kind of restless to change something but I don’t really mind.

Herring and devilled eggs for lunch.

Pasha for dessert. We each have our own version, and while we all each both (because more pasha is always better) and like the other’s, we do think our own is just slightly better.

Lemon merengue pie after dinner.

And the painting of eggs, of course. Note which generation has been taught to straighten up and stop slouching, and which one hasn’t.

Ingrid, who’s the only one among us to regularly practise her craft, makes intricate little paintings.

Adrian focuses on fun designs. Body parts, and blue caterpillars.

My designs this year were inspired by the Desigual dress my mum was wearing, with black circular designs with eightfold symmetry.