What would life even be if I didn’t have a knitting project underway?

This is the third basic sweater I’m doing from the same pattern, Sweatrrr by Åsa Söderman. I don’t agree with all the details (and indeed the first one is getting less use than it could because I dislike the hem and cuffs and neckline) but the fit and shaping around the shoulder and neck area is so perfect that I keep coming back to it.

The first one was in a grayish speckled yarn from MadelineTosh, and the second one a speckled greenish yarn from Apmezga. This latest one also looked mostly speckled at first but turned out to be more variegated than that, and now the sweater is coming out striped. The subtle, thin stripes towards the top were nice, but then as I started decreasing for the waist, the colours pooled more and more and I was getting strong tiger stripes instead. Not the look I was going for! I introduced a second ball of yarn and alternated between the two balls on every row, which mixed up the stripes, but also didn’t look anything like the top section. And then the first ball ran out, and the second ball on its own gave thick stripes again, but by that time I was doing hip increases and the stripes evened out after a while.

It all looks like a haphazard patchwork of different kinds of stripes and I am really not satisfied with it. The only way around it is to rip it up and reknit it without the waist shaping. Do I want a straight, boxy sweater? Preferably not… but I guess it might be better than this.

I know I started on this jigsaw puzzle once before, and gave up before I finished it. It’s a based on one of Van Gogh’s paintings of sunflowers, and there is an awful lot of yellow. I love sunflowers and I love the colours of this painting but it is rather challenging.

You might think that jigsaw puzzles, being very much an indoor activity, are best kept for long winter evenings. But I’ve realized that the subtle differences in all the yellows of this puzzle are even harder to distinguish in lamplight, so I only work on it during daytime hours. If my last attempt was in wintertime, I can understand why I’d give up. Now it remains to be seen whether I can get far enough before the days get too short.

A year ago, Nysse got badly hurt, probably by a car. He underwent surgery and was on cage rest for many weeks. But his bones mended and he recovered. A few months later he was moving like normal, and was not at all inclined to take it easy like the vet thought he should.

(If you’re a pet owner, do make sure to get insurance for them. I don’t even want to think about the decisions we’d have had to make if Nysse was uninsured.)

For months after that he was very scared of loud, rumbly car engines, and it took a while before he was fully comfortable walking around outside. It also took a surprisingly long time for all his fur to grow back. Even half a year later when, at a glance, the shaved area looked normal and furry again, it still didn’t have the same fullness and sheen as the rest of his body. Now, though, you can’t see any sign of it.

Nysse is back to enjoying his life as a cat. Chasing small critters, begging for food, occasionally asking for cuddles, and sleeping on every possible surface.

My current meeting knitting project is a pair of socks. Socks are great background knitting. But this last pair is not moving along. I knit a bit here and there but they’ve been underway for a long time without getting done. I’m almost avoiding picking them up to work on them. What is going on?

I realized today that I don’t much like the feel of them. I use standard sock yarn of 70% wool and 30% nylon for all my everyday socks. Or that’s what I thought, because I hadn’t paid attention to how different the quality can be. Today I touched the green half-done socks just after handling another pair and it struck me immediately. The wintery ones were soft and smooth; the green ones had fuzzy fibers sticking out here and there and felt rough in comparison. Even when I hadn’t consciously realized it, I felt it.

The green yarn is the leftovers of the first thin sock yarn I bought when I had just started producing socks for everyday use. (I hadn’t even discovered asymmetric toes yet.) Some cheap thing, bought online, sight unseen. I switched to small-scale hand-dyed sock yarns soon after, for prettier colours, but never compared the two side by side.

I’m three-quarters done with the second sock in the pair so I’m not going to give up now. I’ll power through and get these done, especially now that I know what my hang-up is. My feet probably won’t even feel the difference once the socks are finished. But my hands most definitely do – I’ve even given up on a yarn due to the feel. I’ll have to be more careful with my yarn buying in the future.

Late-summer weather is unpredictable and not quite as summery any more. Heavy showers, windy afternoons. But when we’re lucky, we can still enjoy meals outside.

After-dinner ice cream (Eric’s home-made stracciatella ice cream). And there was a rainbow in the background. I wished I could somehow capture the combination, but even though I could see and enjoy both at the same time, the camera couldn’t.

Making progress on the trees. I’m not entirely happy with how they’re coming out because they look all flat, but I also don’t know what else to do, so I will keep going. Either it will all come together, or it won’t.

I bought a shirt this summer. Second-hand, nothing special, just to have at home, because it was nice and soft. It had a nice faintly orientally-inspired pattern, white on blue, and sparkly bits.

I washed it a single time, and the pattern disappeared. There are traces of it, but I really can’t call it a pattern any more. And the sparkly bits started falling off. Some were gone (probably down the drain with the washing water) and some were only barely hanging on, and others were loose enough to be poked off with a finger.

Now it’s all asymmetrical and weird and I want the remaining sparkles off. Most are still sticking quite strongly to the shirt, but not all, so I keep poking at them to see which ones are ready to come off. Like picking a scab on my knee. Can’t help it.

Morris, who used to come into our home and be friendly and take naps and cuddle, now only comes here looking for food. He peeks in, walks to Nysse’s food station in the kitchen, eats Nysse’s kibble if he finds any, and walks out. All the while avoiding contact with all of us.

We’ve taken to covering Nysse’s food bowl whenever he leaves some food for later, so Morris can’t steal it. Nysse always “asks” when he wants food, so we just take the cover off then.

First we used an upside-down plate, but the smell of kibble was enough for Morris to try and scrape that plate away. Then we switched to an upside-down bowl that not as easy to slide to the side. I got the impression that Morris actually got angry with the cover when he couldn’t remove it – he dug his claws into the rubber mat quite aggressively.

He’s not at all interested in the cat tuna in the bowl next to it. Nysse also clearly prefers the kibble, but does eat the tuna when he gets hungry for real between meals and not just “hey, wouldn’t some kibble taste lovely right now”.

I miss the friendly, cuddly version of Morris.

Dishcloths start out pretty and square and even. Somehow they always shrink with time, no matter how much I stretch them after washing, and elongate, and skew.

Ingrid made this one for me. It’s wearing out, which gives us an opportunity to make new ones.

For years, we had the perfect lemon press. Stable, good grip, efficient at pressing, easy to pour. Tilted top surface, large drainage openings. Separate tops for lemons and oranges, one small, one larger. Perfect in all ways – except it was made of plastic and started cracking due to all the pressure we’ve put on it.

It’s from our time in London and we probably had it for years before moving, so it gave us a good twenty years of freshly pressed lemon juice. But its days are numbered so it was time to look for a new one.

Two years later, I have trialled some decent ones. Each of them is an improvement over the OG lemon press in some ways, but falls short in others.

This single-piece one in green melamine is nice and pointy on the top, very stable, super easy to clean. But: the side ridges are barely there, so you’re pressing the lemon against a mostlyl flat surface by brute force instead of scraping it open with the ridges.

This metal press from Exxent has better ridges, and is probably more or less unbreakable. But the top is a bit too rounded which makes it a bit harder to start pressing, and the holes are just a bit too small so they clog up and the juice all sits on top instead of draining into the lower part. Still, it’s the one that stays in use for now.

Does the ultimate lemon press exist? One that combines the best of both of these? I have email notifications set up on Tradera but haven’t found anything better than what we have. People sell flimsy plastic stuff, or the long-legged Alessi press that is more sculpture than utensil, or bird-shaped squeezers that also look more decorative than useful. And vintage glass lemon presses from the 1950s that look like they would be hard to clean, but who knows, maybe they’re not? Why is this so hard.