This is my life

+ Glorious, sunshine-y weather
- not being able to find my roller blades. For the first time in years, I wanted to go out on them, and I have no idea where they are. I've pretty much come to the conclusion that I gave them away at some point.
+ Starting a new mystery Knit-a-long project - a purple lacewieght shawl, with beading.
- Having to rip said shawl halfway back because the designer misunderstood my question about how the nupps were to be worked.
- My cholesterol has gone through the roof in the last three months, prompting my doctor to prescribe cholesterol pills. I'm really, really ambivalent about taking them. I think I'm gonna try actually being careful about what I eat, instead. My 3-4 chocolate bars a week habit has to go bye-bye. I'm just not sure what else to change - I don't eat a lot of fast food, although the amount has gone up recently and will be cut back. I have been drinking pop recently, so that'll be cut out - HFCS has got to be a bad thing. M and I spent part of the weekend trying to figure out what had changed to make my cholesterol readings go up my 50% in 3 months, and that's about all we could come up with. I've been eating more pizza, more pop, and more chocolate, so all that will be going away (or at least being cut way, way back).
+ Coming up with a plan for facing the cholesterol problems. I can't just do my usual thing and ignore it, for once.
+ Snow melting - can green, growing things be far behind?
+ Finally figuring out a good chicken tikka marinade (I doubled the cayenne, and it finally has enough kick)
+ Sunshine, and not needing to wear winter boots this morning.
+ A short work week - I have Friday off.
+ An upcoming visit with family, and getting to see my nephew!
+ Sunshine!

So, I've gone and created a new blog. Over on Blogger, actually. I wanted to see what it was like, what the differences in setup and use were like, so I created a new place to talk about my knitting and (maybe) spinning, and other such creative pursuits. I won't stop talking about stuff like that here, but I didn't want to spam my whole friends list with the stuff all the time, and I don't want to lock the posts down to a subset, either, so I can talk about stuff with people who aren't on my friends list. (It actually seems like an awful lot of crafters have craft-specific blogs, probably for the same reason). So, new blog. And the reason it's in Blogger? Mainly so that I can have a sidebar with "percent done" graphics for projects, which you can't do in LJ. *g*

Anyway, I thought I would try out Blogger, and it's just...different. It's just so much more broadcast than conversation. There's nothing like a friends' list there, no easy way to check the blogs of people you'd like to read, who are also using Blogger. There's no easy way to log in to blogger from your own page, so it seems like they assume you'll post something and then never look again. And, you're maybe two clicks away from making money by putting ads on your blog. There's no such thing as public vs. private posts. All in all much more "publishing" than "journal", and it's gotta be hard to build communities over there...

If you'd like to check it out, it's at CarynKnits. I've also created a syndicated feed for it on LJ - something else I wanted to try out (Blogger makes it ridiculously easy to create, LJ makes it ridiculously easy to add, so it's all good), and you can access it here

As I noted on Saturday, I managed to finish my Rogue, finally! I'd forgotten what a rush it was to finish off something I really like, and will wear. I'm not generally very creative or crafty, so managing to finish something like this just felt really, really good.

I also really liked the fact that I had to learn a lot in order to finish the pattern. Some things I'd never done before are:

• Some simple different stitching patterns like slip-slip-knit and knitting/purling through back loops. I learned to knit from my mother and my grandmother, and they were, apparently, pretty straightforward when it came to knitting. Changing the direction of the stitch decreases does make a difference in the look of the finished product, though.


• Another relatively simple trick I'd never done before: Making the increases and decreases one in from the edge, instead of the last stitch in the row. It makes for much smoother edging.


• Double cable increases and decreases - specific to Celtic knotwork-type cabling, these look pretty cool.


• Blocking. I'd never even heard of blocking before, and I was amazed at the difference it makes in the end product. Who thought that wetting and pinning down the wool before putting it all together would actually do anything? *g*


• The biggest of them all, though, had to be the grafting. I'm incredibly proud of how well the grafting of the cable pattern on the hood turned out, considering I'd never done any before.

( And now, on to the pictures! )