Not one I made!

I wear a lot of wool during the really cold months. My own knitting energy comes and goes – I can make maybe two cardigans per season. I could buy, and I would buy, if I could find anything that I actually like, but most wool cardigans and sweaters are very expensive without being very beautiful. I search second-hand stores a lot, but the experience can be hit and miss. I found this lovely sweater, 100% wool, made in Ireland. But when I unpacked it and tried it on, it turned out to be much smaller than the size label indicated. Normal sleeve length for a ladies’ garment is around 55 or 60 cm; this one measured 45. Probably shrunk due to careless washing by a previous owner. Sad.

Ingrid, aiming for an A in sports, practising volleyball.

Mirror selfie.

The back of the neck on this cardigan is too tight, like I suspected. Rip up and redo.

Yes, Eric offered to take a photo if it for me, but this was more fun.

What if it stayed all the way until Christmas?

Loads more snow today, and – in a nice coincidence in timing – they lit the lights on the spruce on Spånga Torg. It felt like Christmas even though there’s a whole month to go still.

We have snow. It’s nice that the cold came first, before the snow – now it stays on the ground instead of melting into slush.

The birds really appreciate the sunflower seeds we put out. Swarms of goldfinches and greenfinches. Blue tits and tree sparrows and nuthatches and magpies and blackbirds.

Now with the snow, the deer also come by to eat the bits that the birds spill.

Piano concert at the Stockholm Concert Hall, with Arkadij Volodos playing Aleksandr Skrjabin and Franz Schubert.

The concert leaflet describes Skrjabin as innovative and boundary-breaking. To me it just sounded dissonant and chaotic. I read that the brain releases dopamine both when it hears things in music that it recognizes or predicts, and when it is surprised. With Skrjabin, I felt there was nothing predictable at all so there was nothing to hang on to. No melody line to follow, no recognizably recurring phrases. It was like… stuff just happening, all the time. Music that’s a hundred years old, and it’s still too modern for me.

Schubert is always Schubert, though!

Volodos also played several extra pieces after the official programme, and the third of them was such a glorious piece of music that I didn’t even hang around to see if there might be more. There was just no way he could top that. Konserthuset kindly publishes updates to the concert programme after the fact, so I now know it was his own arrangement of La Malagueña, a flamenco piece originally written for the guitar I’d guess. You can see a somewhat blurry video of it here. There’s just… fingers absolutely everywhere, and I can’t see how could possibly hit all those notes with any kind of control, but clearly he does. Absolutely magnificent.

Speaking of Schubert, the last concert in the chamber music series that Eric and I go to together also started with Schubert. An octet by Schubert, and followed by another octet by Jörg Widmann, who wrote it as a tribute to Schubert’s octet. And my opinion here was the same – liked the Schubert, but Widmann’s octet was too un-melodious for my taste.

There’s almost more patch than original material in these cardigan sleeves.

I bought lamps to hang over the dining table. Which I’ve been wanting to do for years, but been put off by the hassle of having to find an electrician and figuring out how to hang them and whatnot. Now I have them, and it’s great.

The lamps have clearly spent a bit of time in a cardboard box, so the cables are all slightly wonky and the lamps hang just a little bit askew. I probably wouldn’t even notice, but they hang just at eye height, so I see the light of some of the lamps but not of the others, because they’re tilted away. It makes them look broken. I hope the cables even out with time and the weight of the lamps themselves. Otherwise, maybe a hairdryer could make them relax?

The embroidery club explored blanket stitch. For the first time during these exercises, I ran out of space before I ran out of things to try. Mostly because the organic, lacy blanket stitch (very much inspired by the works of Miriam Gielen) was so much fun that it grew and took up more space than its fair share.