Cotton Noodle

I’m a new convert to short circular needles for knitting sleeves. After a few false starts on the sleeve of the Bronwyn sweater, I asked my knitting pal Ari for her recommendation on sleeve knitting needles. She uses the KnitPro Zing short circulars, and called them “gamechanging”. It took me a few hours to get used to them, but now I heartily agree with her.

I’ve never really been a fan of magic loop knitting. It does the trick, sure - but it really breaks your flow to have to adjust your stitches every half a round, and it doesn’t protect you against pulling that last stitch on the cable a little bit too tight. So I’ve been a double-pointed needle girl for the last few years, which of course has its own downsides. It’s very clacky and messy, and it just adds a bit more cognitive load to the knitting process. Generally, I don’t mind that little extra mental labour, but the Bronwyn is fully cabled, including the sleeves, and I think subconsciously I was just finding it a bit too much.

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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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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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