At five o’clock in the afternoon there is still bright sunshine in places. So much better than the winter’s darkness. The short days of winter do not agree with me.

I am approaching a point (or maybe I’ve even already reached it) where it doesn’t make much sense to knit more socks. I have lots of wonderful, woolly socks now. Not quite in all imaginable colours yet, but close. I can’t remember when I last wore a pair of plain, black, store-bought cotton socks. I also can’t see myself doing so in a foreseeable future. But I don’t want to stop. I can make room for more knitted socks in my sock drawer if I pack away the cotton ones to the basement.

I can also keep the drawer from filling up by knitting socks for others. Adrian is always happy about more socks, and I found these beautiful, crazy yarns that almost seem made for him. Zauberball Crazy – colour gradient yarns in brilliant hues with no repeating pattern. Four socks from one ball, and nothing repeats.

I wonder how they even make these yarns. Are they actually random, or are they carefully designed to appear random? How do they wind the balls so tidily, with the colours so clearly separated? Has this company invented not only a unique way to dye yarns, but also a matching machine to wind them?

Sick enough to not take any photos, but not properly sick. Just really tired, and my brain was so foggy that I didn’t even try to knit.

Eric has been coughing and sneezing since the weekend, and Adrian also came home from school with a runny nose.

She’s off. No longer the one who always gets a lift from others.

Ingrid bought a moped before Christmas, with all her savings and some support from us as an early Christmas gift. It’s been standing in our garage, doing nothing, for months. She already had her license as well, so she’s been anxious to take it out for many weeks but the weather hasn’t allowed it. Now that the streets are finally mostly ice-free, it’s a go.

Today she and Eric replaced the moped’s broken footplate. This project involved detaching literally all fairings and assorted other bits (which she listed for me but I already forgot) to access the footplate, and then putting them back again. It took hours. But now the moped is all ready!

(Ingrid’s closest group of friends are nearly all boys, and all very interested in cars and mopeds. Ingrid knows way more about sports cars than I did at her age.)

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.

Danse Macabre at Kulturhuset. A mixture of theatre, dance and circus.

This was the weirdest thing I’ve seen in a long time.

The scene was covered in garbage. At the rear, a large construction consisting of a steep hill of sorts, and a box/room/house balancing on top of it. The box/room/house was often but not always tilting quite steeply left and right at a constant pace.

On the plus side, three of the people on the scene were really skilled as both actors, dancers and acrobats (and one of them as a singer). The fourth one seemed to be a bit of a filler, with not much to do and not much skill either – later I found out he was the director. I guess he wanted to stand on the scene, too.

The performance itself was a jumbled mixture of all imaginable things. I couldn’t discern any consistent theme or tone. It was so wildly inconsistent that the surprises stopped being surprising and interesting and just made me roll my eyes. It was as if the director/choreographer had just thrown in everything he could think of. Childish, and not in the sense of unbridled creativity, but more like “look at me being all crazy, now you all have to laugh at me”. And most of these fancies were abandoned soon after their introduction. Nothing actually went anywhere.

“Let’s put the dancers in a tilting box and let them hang off the walls! Let’s give the old guy a silly voice like a whiny kid! Let’s pretend he doesn’t know how to put on a shoe! Let’s make the long-haired actors hang their hair in front of their faces so we can’t see them! Let’s make the guy sing! Let’s make the guy give birth to a bundle of clothes, with really realistic groans and screams! Let’s have the small girl get inside an XXL hoodie and put the wrong body part out of the wrong opening! Let’s give the skeleton guy a pair of fake legs to hold so it looks like he has four legs! Let’s make them all stuff garbage inside their clothes! Look at us being so funny and unpredictable!”

I was yawning by the end of it, and so were the people next to me. At the end, the cast were clapping their hands to pull more applause out of the not-very-impressed audience.

The two parts that I actually appreciated were Dimitri Jourde’s singing, and the dancing inside the tilting box, which contained both actual development and progression and plenty of skill.

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.