Hello, crafty and sundry!
Pretty pretty cables <3
See, kinky — rawr!
While I continue to slack on my knitting because of Pokémon (more on that in a minute), I am enjoying the ever-loving crap out of the little bit that I am currently working on. It’s a hat for my youngest, a pattern specifically picked out because I wanted to play with cables for the first time. Now, I’d done a random cable in isolation some months back off of a Wikihow article, which assured me that it wasn’t a scary thing. But as I was working on other things like my cardigan and working on learning socks, I didn’t want to add that to the rest. Like, my approach to learning knitting has been to learn one thing at a time, one new thing per piece I’m doing, which is a less scary way to pick up the assorted skills. I can thank the book I used to get my start for getting that idea into my head. Even if it couldn’t teach me 100% due to my left-handedness, it gave me a good place to build a foundation on. Well yanno, that and getting my anxiety levels to something a bit more manageable, enabling me to learn something new without shutting down beforehand (thereby preventing learning anything — broken brains are great ><).
But yes, cabling is super-simple and fun, and it helps that I invested in the ‘right’ sort of needles for it (kinky, aww yiss). I also have some notched ones to try, but I haven’t fished those out yet. The kinky pack was the one that I found first when looking for my cable needles, so that science will have to wait until later. The straight ones sort of make me nervous, if only ’cause it seems too easy to lose the stitches, unless you like, put end protectors on both ends… which seems a bit too much effort for 2 or 3 stitches to me. Better to have something that will hold the stitches in place.
Serious contest preparation
But yes, the main preoccupation has been, and will continue to be for a bit, Pokémon. I decided to enter the April competition, you see. I have never before entered a contest, or heck, even battled against a friend. The chances of me winning are pretty much completely non-existent, and I’m okay with that. I think. It’s hard to be completely sure of that with my rampant perfectionism (even if it is mainly dormant these days). But I busted out Excel to make with the spreadsheet action, started throwing assorted Pokémon at it, and put together a team. And then I took advantage of the DexNav in Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire to find the same Pokémon again, but with better stats. I don’t know if I’ve done a good enough job of it, but at least I can feel like I’ve made a real effort for this attempt. Maybe in future I’ll join in with the serious breeding, and knowing all the fancy stats in the world. Maybe sometime that will be the fun part. I HAVE grown fonder of spreadsheets as I’ve gotten older, after all…
Other than that, I’m trying to make myself learn to use my camera a tiny bit better. For instance, macro mode… never used it before today. Good thing I’ve never considered myself an actual photographer, ha ha. I like to think I can take a passable picture, but as much as I post pictures on this blog, being able to take even better ones sounds a keen idea. 😀
<3