A cold snap hit all of a sudden, and everything is frosty.

The sun doesn’t reach down to most streets. For my lunchtime walk I head to Starboparken which is a wide enough space to catch some actual sun.

Another concert in the baroque series. Händel’s oratorium Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno. And I just could not get into it.

It may not technically be an opera, but it sure walks like an opera and it talks like an opera, apart from lacking a story. I have never learned to enjoyed operas. That way of using the human voice has something about it that just grates on me. I can admire it from an intellectual angle, but I cannot actually enjoy it.

In the interval, I realized I was steeling myself for the second half. That is not a good frame of mind to be in for a concert. I admitted defeat and walked out, feeling like an uncultured philistine.

It gets dark so early. The shift to winter time didn’t help. Already at half past three in the afternoon, I take a circuit around the house and turn on all the lights.

At six o’clock it feels like night. Several times now I’ve found myself thinking “well, time to start winding down for the night” only to realize that it isn’t even dinnertime yet.

Three months to go before it gets better.

Nysse doesn’t need or like brushing; he keeps himself very clean on his own. He sheds what seems to me like a normal amount (a pet hair remover for the living room carpet is a must!) but sometimes he also loses entire tiny tufts of hair. Small clumps of hairs come loose, but also not entirely – they stick out a few millimetres from the rest of his fur and mar the sleek look of it. They stand out in a way that I can’t ignore. A very gentle tug loosens them fully, and he looks all smooth and pretty again. At those time I feel some kind of kinship with all those chimpanzees who are so often pictured grooming each other.

Lovely ribbon, pretty and sturdy. Thick and wide, which is great for comfort, but I hadn’t quite thought through how that would affect its behaviour. I want the strap to be adjustable so I can wear it either around my waist or cross-body over a shoulder. I thought I could just leave the ribbon ends quite long and tie it differently. When I tried it out with this actual ribbon, the result was bulky and visually way too much. I felt like a gift-wrapped parcel with the large bow that it made. Or maybe a flower girl. A new plan is needed. Maybe snaps?

I’m making a sweater out of (five of the) six recycled yarns. A ribbed raglan sweater in crazy stripes.

This is not the kind of thing I normally wear. There is nothing in my wardrobe even remotely like it. I have been doubting my design decisions about this thing all the way. Then again, I had strong doubts about the last crazy sweater I made, and it still ended up among my favourites.

Even if it does end up not worn much, it’s been a useful learning experience. I’m experimenting with different rates of raglan decreases for the shoulder section, which I haven’t done before. You can do all the calculating and measuring you want, but the only way to really see if the numbers work out, is to knit the thing.

It’s also been surprisingly fun to knit. For the stripes, I bought a commercial pattern (Free Spirit) to follow, because fiddling around with those did not sound like an enjoyable task. This pattern does a good job of mixing up the colours in clever ways, much better than any attempt of mine would have been. It doesn’t try to keep all five going all the time – it focuses on, say, three of them for about eight or ten rows, then swaps in one of the others, etc. It’s still an awful lot of colour changes, and the inside is a mess of yarn ends and needle ends, but there won’t be an end to weave in for every single row.

The 3×1 ribbing is a constant mental challenge. I am so used to 2×2 ribbing for sock legs that I revert to that as soon as I lose focus. I can watch or listen to something while knitting this, but it’s far from mindless knitting.

It’s the time of the year when I really feel my energy flagging and have to make a concerted effort to keep going. Going out in the middle of the day to get some daylight is an important part.

Today I was working from home so I spent my daylight therapy session in the garden with my camera. A surprising number of brave little flowers are still flowering – outliving their wilted comrades, tucked away among dead leaves.

All three four of my hobby projects were blocked due to lack of tools or materials.

The white knit dress: blocked because I ran out of mohair yarn.

The multicolour sweater (which I haven’t even posted about): blocked because I need a longer 2 mm cable needle.

The loose pocket: blocked because I need ribbon for the straps.

The yet-unstarted project of making stitch markers: blocked because I need flat pliers and plastic-coated jewellery wire. I knew I had some kind of jewellery wire in one of the hobby drawers, but it turned out to be not the right kind.

I found the situation almost stressful. Today’s shopping trip solved the first three (the needles were not photogenic enough to make it into the picture) and I’ve ordered jewellery wire as well.

The ribbon was a lucky find. I wandered into a fabric shop that I’ve only been to once before, and they had random spools of vintage ribbons on a shelf. This feels much nicer than the shiny polyester stuff that is mostly produced these days.

I just noticed that the “On this day” feature at the top of the blog is giving me suggestions from twenty years ago. This blog has been live for twenty years. Go me!

2006 was still a time of specialized forums and personal blogs, when individuals and small groups had control over what they posted, who could read it, and where it appeared. The focus was on creativity and sharing, rather than influencing or hating. The web was a happier place back then. So was all of society, actually. More innocent, optimistic, honest and social.

I’m glad I set up my online presence before centralized social media like Facebook etc. It is important to me that my posts will not appear next to ads for busty blondes, or hate-inducing content from Russian troll brigades. I don’t need to worry about losing everything I have ever posted because the platform goes bust or gets acquired or decides to lock me out.

Some years ago I did wonder whether I should start cross-posting to Instagram, to make it easier for people to see my posts, but never got around to it. Then it got acquired, added videos, and now it’s gone the way of all other social media – full of marketing instead of connecting with your friends. I thought I was missing out but that problem disappeared on its own by just waiting. Instagram came, rose, appealed, and got enshittified within, what, ten years?

Some forums still exist. Blogs technically exist but these days they are mostly a thing that companies add to their websites for marketing and SEO purposes. More and more often filled with AI-generated swill.

Will we ever find our way back to honesty and good will online? There’s enough awareness that the current state of online “social media” is damaging that perhaps the pendulum will swing back one day.

With the Rudebrant embroidery no longer at the front of the queue, I went back to my paused project of embellishing the brown cardigan. There were some conflicts of interest when I brought it out this morning, but Nysse agreed to be shuffled to the end that was already finished, so I could work on the incomplete parts.

The cardigan now has a simple design of red and green circles in a broad belt around the waist.

The embroidery isn’t there for adornment so much as it is for distraction and catching the eye – pulling attention away from the width of the hips, distracting from the awkward length, focusing on the waist instead. And it does a bang-up job of that. It’s amazing what a different immediate impression the cardigan leaves now. The value for effort ratio is awesome. I wish I had taken before and after photos of me wearing it.

Embroidering on very stretchy knitted fabric was a fun challenge. You can of course use a piece of stabilizer and then embroider on that as if the knit wasn’t a knit – like any industrial embroidered design on a t-shirt, for example. That’s what most sources seem to advise. I had no interest in smothering the fabric and pretending this isn’t a knit, especially with such a large design. I wanted stitching that would seem as if it belonged there.

The yarn is wool yarn in roughly the same weight that I used for the knitting. Stem stitch helped make it reasonably stretchy. I stitched in and between the knit stitches, making sure to not split the yarn, to further make the embroidery feel like a natural part of the cardigan.

I spent a fair amount of effort fastening the ends – I hope this holds up in washing.