First advent Sunday.

I hung up advent stars inside, and another light garland on the front porch, and sprinkled miscellaneous Christmas stuff here and there. Now the house feels very Christmas-y. As long as I don’t look outside, where it’s +8°C and rain.

We had glögg and advent fika after dinner. Haven’t had time to bake anything Christmas-themed yet – somehow the hanging up of lights took hours – so we have fika from Spånga Konditori. A saffron bun for Adrian, and cakes with saffron curd and vanilla pannacotta and a lingonberry glaze for Ingrid and myself.

Tomorrow is the first Sunday of Advent and it’s time to get the Christmas mood going. Tomorrow is also going to be rainy, so I’m starting with the outdoor lights today.

The thuja in the garden is perfectly placed for Christmas lighting, nicely visible from the whole living room and at just the right distance. What it is not, is perfectly shaped for hanging Christmas lights. It’s very much directed upwards, not like a spruce or a fir with rounds of nearly-horizontal branches, and its boughs are quite delicate. I’ve figured out something of a technique that doesn’t bend the branches and gives an aesthetically pleasing result. It’s a hassle, involving a stepladder which I need to move several times, and a garden fork as an arm extender to allow me to hook the lights over the branches, and even then it takes me several tries for each loop.

When I had done all the work and was all sweaty and a mixture of pleased and frustrated, and put the plug in, I discovered that only about half the garland was lighting up. The rest was dark. It’s daylight, you can’t see the lights very well in the photo, but there are eight vertical lines and only four of them are lighting up.

I had plugged it in while it was still in the box, specifically to avoid wasting my time hanging up something that was not working. But the top layer in the box looked good, and enough of it lit up to give the impression of everything working, and I thought it would be an all-or-nothing situation, so I didn’t even think to check further in.

Now I had to take everything down again, do research to find a new garland, drive somewhere to pick it up, and go through the whole ladder-fork-cable exercise again. Because the alternatives – having to look at sad, broken Christmas lights, or having to put up the new ones in the rain tomorrow, or not having any lights at all for the first Advent Sunday – were even worse.

Got it done in the end, with much huffing and sighing, so now Christmas can start.

The process would be a lot easier if I had more arms. Or maybe if I had a different tool. The garden fork is big and heavy and requires two hands. If I had something lighter, I could have one in each hand, which would make it much easier to put the garland where I want it to go. With one extended hand, I’m just sort of half-shoving, half-throwing it up and hoping that it will catch on a bough. With two, I could maybe actually shape it into an arch. Hmm.

I really do not need any more socks, but I do need a background knitting project for meetings etc. Gloves are almost like socks, right? And I could do with a pair of basic, everyday knitted gloves. Something less fancy than the leather gloves I wear to town – more in style with a worn shell jacket than a fitted wool coat.

I don’t know what I was thinking. A glove is nothing like a sock! And a first glove, especially, is nothing like the 40th sock.

I can knit a sock with a standard fingering-weight sock yarn mostly without thinking. Cast on 60 stitches, knit 48 rows of ribbing for the leg, 18 rows of heel flap, etc etc. Adjust to 64/48/20 if the yarn is 420 m/hg instead of 400 m.

Knitting a glove, though? For the first time for this pair of hands with this particular yarn? It’s constant measuring, ripping up, picking up the stitches, re-knitting. The thumb took me two attempts, and the little finger took three. The polar opposite of mindless background knitting.

So now I have three ongoing knitting projects, and still nothing to bring with me to the office.

Lemon poppyseed cake, going straight into the freezer.

I think of lemon poppyseed cake, along with Estonian oatmeal cookies, as my “fingerprint” cakes. I wouldn’t say that either is my absolute favourite. They’re up there, but I want different cakes at different times, and no one cake is better than everything else. But if you asked me to list, say, five or ten favourites, these two would be there. And they’re cakes that I think I like more than most other people do. In Sweden, I imagine that most people’s list of favourites would be things like cinnamon buns, princess cake, chocolate chip cookies. If you then clustered people by their favourites, you could probably pick me out from among all of them. Sort of like device fingeprinting but with cake. Am I Unique?

I’ve found myself a knitting club!

While I’ve been going to my embroidery club for close to three years now, I haven’t done anything similar with knitting – even though I knit a lot more than I embroider.

I tried a knitting café a couple of times but it was not my thing. People were sitting with those they came with, or otherwise knew, and they were not particularly interested in socializing with newcomers. I didn’t really get anything out of those sessions to be honest.

Today I went to a knitting club in Sundbyberg, to see what that was like. I’m a member of Sticka!, Sweden’s national knitting organization, and they publish a list of local clubs on their website.

I had such a wonderful time. The atmosphere was incredibly welcoming: people were helping each other, complimenting others’ work, sharing thoughts. The person in charge of the group was very focused on welcoming and including everyone. I think this may have been what was missing at the knitting café: someone to set the (right) tone.

Three hours passed in the blink of an eye. I will absolutely be going back. Maybe not on the weeks when the kids are here – I don’t want to miss so much of my time with them – but definitely on the other weeks.

I wanted my knitting for my first time there to be something simple, so that I could focus on the social side of it. Which meant bringing the dress. It’s getting bulky and sprawly, but I’ve worked out a way to roll it up and stuff it into my pillowcase-turned-project-bag such a way that I can work on it without taking all of it out. The knitting gets protection, and the balls of yarn are kept contained.

At some point I bought a set of perfect stitch markers, made of glass beads on jewellery wire. You can see them in many past photos of my knitting projects, especially in the early stages of each sweater and cardigan, where I use them to mark the increase points.

For several years I’ve been on the lookout for more of the same kind, but not found any. The shops here only sell the other kind, like little safety pins. I don’t like those; they are too hard and I feel like they get in my way all the time. They’re OK for marking rows, but not for stitches.

The obvious solution is, of course, to make my own. From some forgotten past project, I already had some tubs of cheap beads – not as nice as the glass beads on the OG markers, but they’ll do. The two missing components I needed to buy were nylon-coated jewellery wire, and crimp beads.

The process itself was quite intuitive and easy to figure out. Cut a piece of wire, thread on some beads, crimp the outer bead, crimp the inner bead, cut off the ends.

Tweezers turned out to be essential. The crimp beads are absolutely tiny. They were sold by the gram – i.e. a package contains one gram of beads – and according to the product info, that one gram has around 90 beads.

Now I have eight new stitch markers. One more batch (some other day, because now it’s close to midnight) and then I can mark all the sixteen increase points on the dress. Right now I have markers at eight points only, at the top of each wedge, and count stitches forwards and backwards from those points to figure out where the actual increases should go. That worked OK when it as just a few stitches to count – I could even eyeball the number without actual counting – but now that the increases are happening ten stitches away from the marker, it’s getting less convenient. It’ll be nicer with actual markers.

Sometimes Ingrid and/or Adrian are in a baking kind of a mood, and the freezer and the cake tins are full of a variety of cakes and cookies. Times like that, I myself only bake when I want something very specific. Other times – like now – they are not in the mood, and the stash runs low. Right now there is a serious cake shortage in the house, so I guess I’m baking.

Baking is not a hobby for me. I don’t mind doing it, but I also don’t go out of my way to experiment, try new recipes, tweak the details, buy books and equipment. I just want cake.

The recipe called for 150 grams of chocolate. In a cupboard I found half of a 50-gram tablet of a dark milk chocolate that I didn’t particularly enjoy. A bit old, but I figured it would be good enough for baking.

It was really not. For some reason that chocolate just wouldn’t melt in the melted butter that I added it to. Instead it turned into sticky clumps, in a way I’ve never seen before, and it took a lot of energetic whisking to break those up. I did manage in the end, and the final result was a fully normal, delicious-looking brownie.

I assume it’s going to taste fully normal as well – I’ll find out some other day. This late in the day I’m not interested in eating heavy sweets, and the whole batch goes straight into the freezer, except maybe for a piece or two for tomorrow, depending on how well (or badly) I can fit all the pieces into boxes.

The dress is starting to look dress-shaped.

It is also starting to get quite bulky, which makes it harder to work on. That’s the price I pay for a sleek silhouette. Some knitting patterns for dresses have you knit them in two parts – top and bottom – but the dress I pictured in my head was all in one piece, and I’m sticking to that plan.

On the plus side (ha!), the number of stitches has now increased to the point where they fill the entire cable and I don’t need to use a magic loop any more.

The Museum of Ethnography has an exhibition about yokai, Japanese spirits. It sounded like fun and it’s been on my list for a while.

I misread the dates and thought that this was the last weekend, but that’s actually a year from now. Which is not a reason to go now!

The Japanese sure have a different kind of spirits in their world… and very specific ones. Spirits who lick ceilings and leave sooty smudges behind. Spirits who love to eat cucumbers and human anuses. Shy water spirits whose legs are so long that their knees are above their heads when they sit down. It’s such a different artistic tradition than the Western European one, with a lot more crude humour, overall silliness and inventiveness.

I liked the idea of tsukumogami, inanimate objects that become alive and self-aware because they have served their owners for one hundred years.

The exhibition as a whole was a bit underwhelming. Interesting information, yes, and the room design was atmospheric, but that on its own doesn’t make a good exhibition. A lot of it was simply posterboards with pictures and text, and just a very few actual original objects, whether paintings or otherwise. 90% of this exhibition could have been a book – or a website.

In the hall outside the exhibition itself, there was a series of AI-generated photorealistic images of yokai in modern settings – a tanaki in a laundromat; an octopus creature at a street food stall. Looked nice, but… was it really necessary to use AI for this? It made the whole experience feel a bit cheap.

Last day of snow for now. I made sure to go out for a walk and pay it extra attention while it is still here.