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.

Today was Wednesday and thus an office day. Afterwards I ran a bunch of errands, went yarn shopping and then to the theatre. This statue in Björns trädgård with its knitted armbands caught my eye as I was walking to Litet Nystan, my current favourite yarn shop. Very symbolic.

The cat often sleeps sort of upside down, with its chin up in the air. I didn’t know that was a thing.

It’s been sunny and above zero for days and days now, and the ice and snow are quickly melting away. Except on the streets that have a forest just to the south, blocking the sun. In those places the asphalt is barely even visible in small patches, and most of the ground is still covered in a thick, dirty, slippery crust. I feel kind of sorry for the people who live on those streets.

The Venus flytrap that had started to grow a flower stalk literally a month ago is finally actually flowering, with pretty, delicate, white blossoms.

No wonder it took the plant a month to produce the stalk – it’s quite disproportionately long. I’m not sure it would even be able to support its own weight without the help of the windowpane.

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.

It’s time to bring out the camera bracelet again, to remind me to take photos. I’ve forgotten more often than I like, and then cheated by taking two photos the next day.

We discovered the wonders of singles queues at ski lifts last year. This year we pretty much went all in for the singles queues and effectively cut our queueing time in half, by my estimate. Often we didn’t even end up riding the lift alone – there were many groups of three and four people in the main queue on the six-seater lift, which left two or even three seats free for the single queue. Win-win!

Our second time-saving, ski-experience-enhancing trick is to eat a slightly later lunch. At around twelve o’clock, all the families with young kids flood the restaurants and leave the slopes empty. Sometimes the slopes were so empty at midday that we could glide right into the single queue, double pole our way through it without even slowing down, and swoosh straight into a lift seat. Down and up and down again without a single stop.

Branäs is a smallish resort with a lot of family-friendly blue slopes. It didn’t take long for a few favourites to emerge, mostly based on the availability of chair lifts. Button lifts are cute but take forever to actually get anywhere. And you’re on your own all the way – can’t talk to anyone else. Chair lifts on the other hand turn skiing into much more of a social activity.

The slopes down in Mattesdalen with its four-seater chair lift were quite long and had some really nice stretches, but also a horrible icy patch in the middle where three slopes met. Every time we got there it was really crowded, with people struggling to get past the ice and the churned-up drifts of snow on top.

When we tired of skiing over there, we spent hours simply going up and down a single slope on the other side. The slope itself was mostly in the sun, in good shape, neither icy nor uneven, and the six-seater lift there seemed brand new and got us up the mountain smoothly and comfortably. After a while we knew the individual features of that piste by heart – keep to the left here at the top, stay away from that icy patch next to the lift queue, watch out for skiers coming in from the side over here.


Adrian worked on braking less and getting his turns more parallel. Later in the afternoon he tried out the bumpier ground just off the piste, under the lift. Ingrid challenged herself by dramatic hockey stops, aiming to throw as much snow in the air as possible (or on Adrian’s skis when he’d already stopped before her).

Branäs is situated at a low elevation. Where the peak in, say, Åre or Idre is above the treeline, offering dramatic views of windswept snow and ice, in Branäs you’re never far from civilization. There are trees all the way up to the top of the mountain, and houses everywhere between and around slopes. Very convenient, but I did miss the wide mountainous vistas, and the peace and quiet of skiing through a slope surrounded by nothing but forest.