Blog: 2025

This week I spent some time improving my marker rendering skill.

On Friday I created a fashion illustration for an outfit concept I’m working on for my course, and I spent hours on it, working to the best of my abilities to render it in colour. But after I was done, I just felt so disillusioned. It looked so rough and amateur, and it had taken me so long because I didn’t really know what I was doing.

To be clear: three years ago I would have been stunned if you’d told me I could draw something like what I drew last week. But we always strive for better. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at such beautiful illustrations, and my standards for myself have shifted.

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Although I’ve been knitting since 2012, I haven’t actually focused very much on improving the quality of my craft recently. I learned fair isle a few years ago, but other than that, I think my ability is basically the same as it was 8 years ago - despite being fairly prolific in my output.

I consider myself fairly advanced - I can knit lace, fair isle, cables - and ladder down to fix a mistake many rows back too. I’ve made blankets, socks, soft toys, scarves, and jumpers galore. But my ribbing is sloppy, and you can plainly see where I’ve woven in my ends. I’m noticing uneven tension and fit issues - garments too big, too small, or too imperfect. Knitting doesn’t have to be perfect, I know - but I feel like my skills have stagnated, and I could be better than this if I just applied myself a little better.

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I just added tags to all my blog posts and gallery projects that I consider “incentivised”, i.e. I received the pattern or fabric for free in exchange for pattern testing or content creation.

This all made me think very hard about why I do it, and whether creating this sort of content is at odds with my views about the web (marketing makes the web bad, etc.), so to think it through, I wrote out a piece on the topic of incentivised content.

I’ve published it as a page, rather than a blog post, as I’m using pages to present my stance on something. Blog posts are a point in time. But my stance might change, and if so, I’ll update the page.

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I usually make a few new year’s resolutions, and forget them by the end of January. This year, I’ve decided to go all in on one really difficult target: I’m going to try to read 52 books this year.

This is a crazy target for me. My highest ever book count was 37, and that was years ago, when I was hyperfixated on the very concept of reading. I’ve not been like that in recent years. Last year, I read 10 books, and two of them I had to finish in audiobook form because my concentration was so shot. (No slight on audiobooks as a form of reading - but personally it’s a last resort.)

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