Six colours is too much. Remove almost any one of them, and suddenly the rest cohere, where before they never quite fit together in my eyes.

Take away the sharp white, and now there’s a set with a 1970s vibe.

Take away the dark grey for a lighter, brighter version of the above.

Take away the mustard yellow, and now it’s red tones combined with a greyscale.

Take away the pink, and the red and mustard make up a muted pair, with a greyscale in the background again.

The white, I think, is the odd one out – sharp and bright compared to all the other yarns. Plus it’s going to be the easiest one to use in some other project in the future.

Nysse has been rather cuddly recently, often sleeping in my lap for long stretches of time. I feel cruel when I force him to move and do my best to avoid that. Make sure to have a knitting project, phone and computer within reach before settling in. Have a cushion or two at hand to prop up the computer, for slightly improved ergonomics. Which is still crap when I’m sitting like this, with the computer off to one side, so I tend to do more knitting and less reading and writing when I have Nysse asleep on me. With the knitting, it’s best to work on either something really small that I can hold above him, or something quite large that I can rest on him like a blanket. Mid-size work that only hangs loosely above him is not great because it tickles him.

Our team is getting shuffled to a different corner of the office. We’re now at the very far end, furthest from the kitchen, and about as far as you can get from a toilet. It’s still an upgrade in the sense that we get better views, and even a small balcony. Plus the room is smaller and cosier. Until now we’ve been occupying a quarter of a large room that is otherwise mostly unoccupied, so sometimes it feels like we’re rattling around in an empty crate. And it means that the room has often been a bit cold.

Today I learned how modern office interiors can work. There are these “wells” in the floor where cabling comes up. And it turns out that that’s all modular and adjustable. You lift up the carpet squares, under which there are floor squares, under which there is an almost knee-deep space with cables and ductwork. The floor pieces are only supported in the corners – the rest of the space is free to play with.

If, for example, you want to rearrange the desks in your room, you can move the cables around, put the floor piece with the well where you want the cables to come out of the floor, and put the rest of the floor back. New room layout, no messy cables, and no handymen required. At most you may need to cut out a space for the floor well in a new carpet piece, because the carpet pieces and the floor pieces don’t match each other in size.

This yarn will be a sweater. A striped one, I’m pretty sure. But the rest is not as obvious.

Held singly, or double? It would be nice to knit something that goes fast, when my other project is a slow one – thin yarn, large garment. But do I like the look and feel of this yarn when held double? Hmm.

Plain stripes? Marled? Stripes with a garter ridge in between? Garter ridges all the way? Stripes combined with ribbing?

Too much freedom.

It’s more or less dark when the working day is over. Plain old digging can be done in lamplight at a pinch, but planting requires daylight, so I took a gardening break in the middle of my work-from-home day today.

I had put some Aquilegias at the front of the new planting, but the deer ate them within a week or so. I’ve now moved them to the slope on the other side of the garage, where I think the deer are unlikely to go, and put other stuff here.

It struck me today that my choice of plants is heavily skewed towards the beginning of the alphabet, because the garden centre at Ulriksdal arranges their plants alphabetically within each section, and A is closest to the entrance. In place of the Aquilegias I have Astrantias and Asters. Next time I need to select plants, I’m going to walk all the way to the far end and start at Z.

The flowering quince harvest was good this year. Lots of large, even fruit.

I was going to make candied quince. Eric has been doing this in the past but now it’s up to me. I clearly don’t have his Fingerspitzengefühl for preserving – it was a failure. The first step in the recipe is to cook the fruit for “a short while” to soften it. I felt like I had barely gotten the water all the way to boiling and the fruit had already turned into mush. Next time I will try just pouring boiling syrup on the fruit straight away, no cooking them.

There was no rescuing that – it was too mushy to even strain – but I also didn’t want to throw it all away, neither the fruit nor the work. So I added more sugar, cooked it all a few more minutes, and pureed it all. Now I have some kind of quince sauce – runny, because of all the water, and not as sweet as jam. Might go well with yoghurt or oatmeal, I guess?

First concert in one of this season’s series, Orfeus Barock. Solo cello and lute, and the two together. Music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Silvius Leopold Weiss and Domenico Gabrielli.

I love Bach’s cello suites (one of which was included today) and cello music in general, and yet somehow this concert didn’t work for me. It wasn’t bad, in any way, but somehow the music melted into a soothing blanket of sound and the melody got lost.

My seat was several rows back and I couldn’t see the musicians very well. The lighting was low, with much of the room quite dim and a single lamp lighting up the sheet music, and the musicians to a certain extent. (In the photo above the main lights have been turned on again; it wasn’t this bright during the concert at all.) The organisers said they wanted to recreate the feeling of being in your own living room, but for me the result was just soporific.

Maybe it was also the performers’ style? I would have wanted to someone else play the same piece directly afterwards, to compare.

Visited Tre brudar, a nearby shop that sells foodstuff from the Baltic countries. Ingrid was hoping for Merekivid candy, but they didn’t have any. Instead we came home with Estonian dark rye bread and Kohuke quark sweets.

The embroidery club isn’t just a group of embroidering together, with chatting and fika.

We have themed projects, we learn new stitches together, we arrange workshops.

We also share inspiration and ideas. People bring books, old or new, for others to browse. Embroidery books, of course, but also for example books on sewing with African printed fabrics. We share tips about ongoing and coming exhibitions and events. We show off older works.

I have been thinking of sewing a loose pocket or a small everyday handbag, and mentioned it two weeks ago. Another member said she’d made several. Yesterday she brought a bunch of them along and showed them to the rest of us. The design with a single band of fabric binding the sides together and also making up the shoulder strap seems like a good one.

Finished the rectangle shapes during today’s embroidery club meeting. I’m glad I didn’t use appliqué to make them. Stitching gave me a lot more to play with: stitch length, direction, density.