The sweater-or-dress is long enough that, if it were a sweater, it could be finished. It will not be a sweater, though, because I’ve still got loads of yarn left.

The thing that usually happens when I try something on, happened now as well. It wasn’t quite the way I wanted, so I ripped up a good 10 centimetres. I wanted it to fit very closely around the torso and then flare somewhere around the lower hips, but that didn’t work out. The fabric is somewhat stiff, even with the added silk mohair, so instead of stretching around the body, it rode up and bunched at the waist. It may be that the weight of the skirt would pull it straight, but also maybe not, so it’s not something I want to bet on. Rip up and redo with more width around the hips so that the fabric can hang and drape nicely.

This week, when I get up at 6:30, the street lights are still on. Last week they were out before I got up.

By the time I leave for work half an hour later, it’s mostly light outside.

Was woken at 3:15 this morning by a fire alarm going off. False alarm, there was no actual fire.

Somehow we all instinctively reacted as if it was a false alarm. Nobody hurried, much less panicked.

I had walked all the way through the house and up the stairs, located the alarm, walked away, come back with a chair, climbed up, taken down the alarm, and was in the process of disconnecting the battery, before Ingrid or Adrian even got out of their rooms (right next to the blaring alarm).

Hopefully it was due to good instincts – no smell of smoke, no heat – and not just laziness. Hopefully we would react differently if there was an actual fire.

Encouraged by Friday’s outing, I went to the city again to see more of Stockholm Craft Week.

There was a group exhibition in Gustaf Vasa church, of all places, by graduate students in the textiles program at Konstfack. Nice location, but it would also have been nice if the event organizers had taken into account and informed visitors about times when the exhibits could not be visited due to Sunday service. I had to hang around for half an hour before I could enter.

I liked the folded knits by Hanna Åström – very three-dimensional, geometrical and sculptural.

There were all the usual textile crafts – embroidery, pieces of weaving – and then suddenly a sculpture/installation thing depicting an anthropomorphic fish.

From Gustaf Vasa church I continued onwards to the shop/gallery of Konsthantverkarna where there is an exhibition of embroidered works by Lotta Sjöberg. She is an illustrator and artist, and her textile works are like drawings but in thread on fabric. Often full of wry humour, often about women’s everyday concerns.

I follow her on Instagram and mostly knew what to expect, but was still surprised. I had gotten a rather misleading impression of how large her embroideries were, based on the size of the stitches in them. What I thought was sewing thread or maybe one strand of embroidery floss, was instead silk organzine, apparently the thinnest thread manufactured. (Since today was the opening day of the exhibit, Lotta Sjöberg was present herself, and I took the opportunity to ask questions.)

It’s like cobweb. Truly, you could only make this in silk, because a thread this thin in any other fibre would break if you tried to use it.

I’ve been aware of Stockholm Craft Week for a few years, and this year got around to visiting some of its activities for the first time.

Kapsylen is a co-owned/co-op space for craftspeople, located in a building that used to house a bottle cap factory (hence the name). During Craft Week they open up some of their spaces for the public to visit. Some of the rooms housed a small exhibition; others were actual workshops.

Ingela Friedner had made a series of boxes with a textile layer at the front and a reflective surface at the back, which then reflected the otherwise hidden reverse of the textile layer. Simple but ingenious.

Sara Casten Carlberg embroiders intricate fantasy landscapes on painted and printed fabric.

Lovely sculptures of gymnasts in the workshop of Eva Larsson.

Elisabeth Ottebring was at work in her ceramics workshop, despite the late hour. I learned that most ceramics clay these days is synthetic because there isn’t much natural clay left.

An “open loop” is a term that David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done, uses to refer to unfinished commitments – anything that needs to be acted upon, finished, or decided. Most people have most their open loops in their heads, but they can also be physical things. Every time you walk past it, it reminds you – oh, right, I should really be doing something about this.

Somehow I had accumulated a lot of physical open loops recently. Every room in the house had several piles of things that I really should be doing something about, but don’t have the time or energy or resources to address right now. They were stressing me out and annoying me. I dislike clutter, and I particularly hate ugly, messy clutter.

I may not be able to close all those loops immediately, but at least I could gather them all into one place. Now I have a pile of boxes and bags and smaller piles in my bedroom, but I can move through all the other rooms without stuff constantly nagging at me. David Allen would certainly tell me to identify all the tasks in this pile and write them down, but for me this pile acts as a physical to do list. Yeah, you’re supposed to only have one list of tasks and this clearly isn’t it, but it’s good enough for me.

My childless weeks are my “getting things done” weeks. I have more time and more energy. I love spending time with them, but I’m an introvert, and spending time with people inevitably wears me out.

When I’m alone in the house, there is always the temptation to just spend my evenings reading and knitting. While that is nice, I do want and need to do more than that. A trick that really helps me stay out of the sofa trap and actually get something done is to commit in advance. On office days, I use my bicycle commute home to decide on what I’ll do in the evening. Just sort of mull my options over and pick something that I feel I’d be in the mood for doing on this particular day. By the time I get home, I’ve had enough time to let the options roll around in my head that one or a few of them have come out top and then settled there, solidly enough that they feel like a promise.

Today’s commitment was to drive to the big recycling station with the last junk from the basement clean-out and a pile of plastic pots from all the plants I bought recently. Normally I’d leave this for the weekend, but really a weekday evening after rush hour is the perfect time for this errand. Traffic isn’t bad and the recycling station is desolate.

Had I come home, eaten dinner, sat down in the sofa, started thinking about whether I should do something… I know for sure that I would never have found the energy to get up again for an hour-long errand. But now I was already in motion, so it wasn’t such a big deal.

A brief moment of magic, with a full rainbow over Spånga.

A minute before, there was light drizzle from a grey sky. Two minutes later, same again. Rain, no bow.

Lucky me happened to be outside at the right moment. Too bad that the corner of Spånga where I happened to be at was a recycling station with views of nothing but a parking lot and train tracks beyond it.

While sorting through the basement this summer, I found an old lava lamp. Unpacked it recently and put it up, thought it might be fun to look at. Maybe swap out the firefly lamp for a while.

The lava lamp turned out to not thrive in the temperatures that are normal for this house. In early September it wasn’t doing too badly, but now the colder it gets, the less fun the lamp is to look at. On the cooler evenings, he lava just doesn’t flow – it melts and sort of undulates, but never bubbles up. The lamp underneath is not hot enough to keep the whole thing warm in our cool living room.

Looking at a sad lava lamp does not make me happy. I think it’s time to re-home it.