Bye-bye winter. This is the last snow for this season. It’s +5°C now at seven in the morning and will stay that way throughout not just the coming days but also the nights.

This design was supposed to be five rectangles. Three large rectangles overlapping at the corners, with the overlaps forming two smaller rectangles of negative space. Just like the first iteration, and the second one. I got so engrossed in the latticework of the second large rectangle that I completely lost sight of the big picture, and forgot to leave that one corner empty. Only when I took a step back after completing the third one did I see what I had done.

Can I unpick that corner and still keep the rest of the second rectangle intact?

The striped sweater has been in timeout for a month or so. I knitted the sleeve straight because I didn’t want to deal with stripes and ribbing and decreases at the same time, and I hoped that the ribbing would make it stretchy enough to fit well even without shaping. At about halfway down the forearm, it was becoming clear that that wasn’t going to work out. I was pretty sure I’d have to rip the sleeve back past the elbow and redo it with shaping, but I really wasn’t looking forward to that.

For today’s knitting club meet-up, I packed the sweater and no other project, so I’d have no choice but to bite the bullet. Ripping back the stripes was exactly as finicky and slow as I had expected it to be. So much yarn management: rip back one row at a time, wind it up, carefully shuffle the balls around to keep them from tangling. But with company around me, it wasn’t as tedious as it would have been otherwise. I got it all done and actually got as far as knitting a few rows at the end. (With decreases!)

The main benefit of the porridge book has not been the recipes in it, but how it’s made me rethink porridge.

In my mind, porridge has always been a simple meal. It consists of the porridge itself and a topping. The porridge itself is utter simplicity: grains + liquid + salt. The topping can be jam, honey, fruit, or possibly even a combination such as apple sauce + cinnamon. The most adventurous that I’ve been in the past is putting (some of) the topping in the porridge: cooking the porridge with a diced apple, instead of adding apple sauce on top, and then maybe adding nuts as well. Two toppings? Where will this craziness end?

Somehow it’s never really occurred to me that I could add more. It’s like I didn’t give myself permission to make porridge a complex, luxurious thing… because it’s not supposed to be?

You can put cinnamon AND cardamom in the porridge. You can cook the fruit – fry the banana, turn the pears into a compote, make a sauce from the cherries. You can do that AND add a sauce AND nuts as well. All at the same time

This looks ugly as all get out – beige with brown and more brown and then this really horrible greenish-brown – but it was decadently good. Cardamom-flavoured four-grain porridge, a home-made pear compote, an artisanal peppermint-flavoured honey, and chopped walnuts.

Also: one of the three spoons I bought in Japan was just perfect.

Made soles from leather scraps from the crafts store and sewed them to my slippers. Surely I won’t be able to wear through these any time soon.

At first this seemed like a quick and easy project. Then I got to the toe section. Poking the needle into the cramped space and receiving it with sweaty fingers, without pricking my fingers or getting knots in the thread or losing the thread, did not go very smoothly. I certainly won’t be posting any close-ups of those stitches. I was glad as long as each stitch came out roughly near the edge of the sole, never mind getting them even in size and distance.

A smattering of fresh snow and brilliant sunshine – and forecasts of sustained above-zero temperatures. This might just be the last beautiful weekend of winter for this season.

I went for a walk around lake Säbysjön on Järvafältet. First around the lake, then on the lake itself. There was a ploughed skating track on the ice, which was also great for walking.

Somewhere around the northern tip of the lake got tired of the endless views of the lake and not much else and headed back for the woods. Then got tired of the wide tracks and followed a deer track through the woods, until that petered out into nothing and I just headed roughly in the right direction based on where the sun was and where I thought I saw the open space of the lake to be.

I should have aimed for a longer circuit from the start. I got back to my starting point after only two hours of walking, and I wouldn’t have minded doing twice that.

Adrian, Ingrid and I used to go for fika at Spånga Konditori on our weekends together. We lost our routine over Christmas, and then forgot to start again in January. Then of course Ingrid and I were gone for two weekends.

Now we’re back at the bakery and the cakes are as fabulous as ever. A red velvet raspberry cheesecake for Adrian, a raspberry truffle macaron (hallonbiskvi) for Ingrid, and a raspberry pistachio tartlet for me. I wonder if the raspberry theme is due to leftover pink materials from Valentine’s day.

This morning I took the next train after my usual one and got to the office fifteen minutes later. Also, not having been to this office in almost a month, I’d lost my routine and got off at Stockholm Central instead of Odenplan, which is slightly closer. This had me walking past Adolf Fredrik church two minutes past eight o’clock instead of a quarter to, so I got to hear the church bells in the morning sun.

Things I bought in Japan: wooden spoons for eating.

I have large wooden cooking spoons and forks and spatulas, and even larger wooden serving spoons. Plenty of wooden butter knives, even a wooden cake slice. For years already I’ve wished for a good wooden eating spoon, but never found one. I’ve run across crafts stalls selling spoons of roughly the right size, but they’ve all had a shape that’s more decorative than useful. A good eating spoon fits the shape of the human mouth. And is made of a suitable material! A spatula can be rough and scratchy, but an eating spoon needs to be as smooth as silk.

Why a wooden spoon? Because wood is soft and warm, where metal is hard and cold. I mostly don’t mind forks, but metal spoons sometimes truly feel like lumps in my mouth, and I wish there was something better.

One of the shops in the cookware district in Tokyo must have been run by someone like me. They had dozens of varieties of wooden spoons, in all kinds of sizes and shapes and types of wood. I bought three likely-looking variants, hoping that at least one would be good. All roughly the same size, but varying in angle, curvature and material.

What I didn’t think to do is take photos of the labels. They’re three different kinds of wood, but which ones?

Knitting club Wednesday. I didn’t want to bring a sock – sock knitting is for commutes and meetings and flights – and the striped sweater is in time-out because I don’t feel like it, so I started a shawl.

The yarn I bought online some time ago. Maybe the colour wasn’t exactly like I imagined from the photos, but it’s still quite pretty (better in daylight than in this late-night lamplight) and feels very, very nice. Some combination of merino wool, silk and cashmere, according to the description. It’s an unplied yarn, if it can even be called “a yarn”: it’s an unplied bundle of eight very, very thin threads, thinner even than sewing thread. Some are red and some are purple, and they’re probably all made of different fibres. It’s tricky to knit with, easy to miss some of the threads with the needle – definitely not something I could knit without looking at what I’m doing.