Cotton Noodle

I’m Lisa and I make things for fun. This website is my little handcrafted home on the web, where I (infrequently) blog and (every now and then) document my sewing and knitting projects through a photo gallery.

Cotton Noodle is part of the IndieWeb, a rebellion against corporate silos, in favour of small, homegrown, quirky little websites, like back in the days when the Web used to be wonderful. The Web is still wonderful, you just have to know where to look.

Currently, I'm...

  • Knitting: a light blue cabled jumper. The pattern is Brooklyn Tweed’s Bronwyn, and the yarn is Studio Donegal’s Soft Donegal.
  • Sewing: a top secret pattern test! I enjoyed the test, and immediately wanted to make another view.
  • Reading: Season of Storms by Andzrej Sapkowski.
  • Playing: Myst. Crazy that I’ve never played it before.

(Last updated: )


Latest on the blog

Equilibrium

The word I chose to represent how I live this year was “equilibrium”. At the back end of last year, I found myself continually pushing too hard on individual projects, to the detriment of all else (hello monotropism). Sewing dresses for parties on a deadline, learning D&D and writing adventures from scratch (!) at short notice, that sort of thing. I’d also started a new role at work that was using more of my brainpower, so it was all getting a bit much.

This year, I decided to allow myself to spread my efforts across my projects more thinly, in favour of a better balance. And I specifically chose the world “equilibrium” rather than “balance”, because you can balance a spoon on your nose, but that’s not a particularly sustainable way to live. “Equilibrium” is less precarious, and more self-correcting.

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Restyling the Cotton Noodle website

I’ve just redesigned the styles on this here website. This is its formal christening: I’m dubbing it version 2. How original!

There were a couple of reasons I wanted to redesign it - technical and aesthetic.

The technical side

I didn’t really have a lot of faith in the styling code I’d written before. I wrote the v1 styles as part of my migration to Hugo, and there was so much going on with figuring out all the tooling and building out a gallery. Although I did put love and care into the v1 styles, I was styling at the same time as figuring out how to even make Hugo templates, and re-learning CSS having not really touched it in anger since around 2005. I’d tried out BEM, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but I grew to hate how heavy-handed it was.

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52 book challenge: end-of-year reflections

I achieved my 2025 goal of reading 52 books in a year! It wasn’t easy, and I’m definitely not going to do it again, but I am so glad I did do it. I’ve read things I otherwise wouldn’t, I’ve pushed my perseverance, and I’ve developed some really good habits that I am hoping I can hang on to.

The full list of books I read is at the bottom of this post, but first, I’ll share some of my reflections now that the challenge is over.

What I learned

I found it hard not to gamify this. When under pressure I picked shorter and shorter books. Never under 100, as that was the minimum I set for my rule, but let’s be real - even 150 is a very very short book.

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