I know, yet another boring dumbbell photo. (I am bad at remembering to take photos during the workout.) But I am proud of sticking to the workout habit when, some days, I really don’t feel like it.

And that’s only before starting. I still tell myself that I can stop partway through but I never end up taking that out. I do actually enjoy the workouts, and the pleasant muscle soreness afterwards.

13|37 turns 13.

In between all the knitting, I sometimes make a little progress on the fabric storage box that I’m making out of the embroidery samples.

It keeps growing in complexity. First I realized the sides needed stabilizing so there was interfacing to be ironed on. Then I decided the edges needed piping (of sorts – this is technically not piping but a Swedish patchwork technique called skarvsöm). Then I didn’t want to machine stitch the edges and hand sewed them instead. Then I started working on the lining which also needed some padding, which I’m also stitching by hand. So it’s nowhere near done.

I haven’t sewed much recently, because I haven’t felt like it. I’ve sewn cushions and curtains and whatnot when needed, but it’s never been one of my favourite crafts. I think I’m learning now that I like sewing but not machine sewing. The two skirts I made I also hand stitched.

First day back at work after a two-week break. (I save up flex hours every winter so I can take a proper break over Christmas.)

I thought I’d get my office day done early in the week. Got up early and took the train to central Stockholm.

It was full dark during my commute, and foggy. Patches of grimy, gravelly snow still here and there, but mostly everything was gray and wet.

And then all sorts of meetings cropped up, including an unplanned one-and-half-hour one at the end of the day which led to over an hour’s overtime. And then the commute home and getting groceries and making dinner. I am exhausted.

Planning for the next knitting project; a sweater/jumper. I’ll be using the same yarn as for the fiery cardigan but in a different colour. I’m thinking of going up a step in needle size to get a slightly looser, thinner fabric – which means knitting a new gauge swatch. For the non-knitters, a gauge swatch is a small, square “trial” piece that you knit with the exact yarn and needles you plan to use for your real project, to figure out how many stitches you get per 10 cm.

For some reason I find these incredibly, unbelievably boring. I truly hate knitting gauge swatches. It makes no sense – if I was knitting a dishcloth of the same size, I doubt I’d had any negative feelings about it. It’s just knitting! Which I like! Perhaps it’s the inherent uselessness of them. You make one, do the measuring and counting, and then just… put it away to gather dust forever, or rip it up.

Still, starting knitting without swatching and then having to rip up the real thing after realizing it doesn’t fit – which would mean a lot more wasted work – would be even more annoying. So I grit my teeth and get it done.

I gave Eric and myself – but mostly Eric – a set of flannel bedsheets for Christmas. I wear a long sleeve top to bed in winter, Eric doesn’t, so he is more exposed to the bedding.

I was surprised at how much warmer these felt than ordinary cotton. I expected some difference, of course, that was the whole point, but was still wowed. Going to bed no longer involves steeling myself to that initial feeling of a cold bed.

On the minus side, there is the lint. So much dark red lint everywhere in the bedroom. On the bottom sheet, on the carpet, on the floor, on my bed socks, on clothes that just happen to be in the vicinity. Worth it, though.

After a few hours the introverts start taking off into various corners, while the extroverts could happily keep going all night.

Adrian, just like me, likes arranging eggs symmetrically in the carton.

When we moved back from London to Stockholm, one of the things we brought with us was the tradition of Christmas pudding. And mince pies, which I now see I have never blogged about either.

It tastes a lot better than it looks in a photo.

In England we bought them. Every supermarket in London had Christmas pudding, and if you wanted a fancy one, you got it from Harrods or Fortnum & Mason. Here in Stockholm we also started out with store-bought ones, from NK or The English Shop. But one year (I think maybe because NK stopped carrying them?) Eric tried making his own, and after that there was no going back.

Christmas pudding is served with brandy cream, which you can think of as a sweetened sauce béchamel flavoured with brandy. The pudding on its own is a bit too heavy and sticky, which the sauce helps balance. A hot pudding paired with a cold brandy sauce is the perfect combination.

There is a tiny problem, though: the sauce always runs out before the pudding. So then you buy more sauce – and then you run out of pudding before sauce. And then you buy another pudding. Which works if you’re in London with its abundant offering of Christmas puddings, but is harder when you make your own, which takes a couple of weeks at least if you want it to be really good.

This time when we ran out of sauce I tried hacking the process with a sweetened, brandy-flavoured quark mixture (no cooking, just stir it all together) and it was better than nothing but not as good as a proper sauce.

Done with the cardigan, I need a new knitting project. This will become a shawl.

It took me four attempts to get this far before I was satisfied.

The first time I wasn’t happy with the tension. The pattern suggests 3.75 mm needles which may exist in the US but generally aren’t available in Sweden. I tried 4 mm needles, but the result was too loose and floppy.

The second time I wasn’t happy with the long edge. The pattern suggests an edge treatment that would look good in theory, but in my hands it came out too tight, so the whole long edge pulled in way too strongly.

The third time I wasn’t happy with the coloured inserts. I tried a green alpaca yarn that looked good in perfect lighting but didn’t stand out enough when seen from a distance. The red works much better.

A knitting project involves so many choices, and for every one of them I can make the wrong decision. Sometimes it doesn’t matter much but other times I can see pretty clearly that I’m on a route where I won’t be happy with the end result.

It’s a skill in and of itself, I guess, to notice which decisions matter most, and to spot problems early. The worst knitting decision I made and committed way too strongly to was choosing a pattern that didn’t work for me, with the first green cardigan, and that one was so bad that it literally took me years to get past it, because it killed all my joy and confidence. A traumatic knitting experience. But that one was so tangled up with other decisions – about yarn and needles and sizing – that it was hard to pinpoint the actual problem. And who knows, maybe I was doing something wrong that I could have fixed to make it work.