Site redesign!

. . . if by redesign, you mean, 'I decided my homemade custom background and whatnot looked amateurish and unpleasant, so I chose my favorite out of the available default templates'. Which is pretty much what happened.

I'm a knitter, not an html coder, and not even a particularly good blogger. I decided I'd rather this looks okay with minimal effort from me, than it continues to look bad with no effort, or I update it and get it exactly how I want it (I assume this would require a great deal of effort to do it right).

Anyway, I've been thinking about why I bother having a blog and what it's good for. I like explaining things to people, so a lot of my posts have been sort of 'how to' statements, but I would also like for it to be entertaining. I've been spending more time on Ravelry's I Blog group, and it's given me some things to think about.

Expect more posts soon.

Changes!

Well, I realized that it's May. And hey, I have (had) a blog. Which I seem to have forgotten about. Time to pick the thread back up; while I have not been blogging, I at least have still been knitting, in the few intervening months.

A new start goes well with a blog redesign. The background and banner pictures are from the Bernat Felting neckwarmer; I love that set of colors so much that now they're part of the blog, as well as part of my knitting. And as a bonus I have learned a bit about messing with the standard Blogger template.

Right now I still have many pictures to tweak and format, but expect some new patterns and projects to be up very soon.

What's in a name

Turns out I am, by far, not the first person to think of the name 'Nerd Knits' either. In fact there is a quite popular knitting blog by that very same name. Ashamed, I have renamed this back to its original, if less interesting, title - Shishkani Knits. And I have resolved to start googling more, at least before I start things like this.

All my apologies, should she ever read this, to the creator of the real 'nerd knits' blog. The name was, and still is, hers.

I thought I would expound though a bit on why I chose this name in the first place. I think it is mainly because I started knitting like most people do, probably, with no particular goal in mind other than making and owning pretty things. But I quickly found my work being colored by the other things I do and enjoy. I dreamed up projects based on video games, TV shows, or more boring things like the fruit flies I study. I wrote up patterns, though I haven't had time to start on either, for a scarf that gives the sequence for the A allele for the ABO gene (My blood type is A+, hence the choice) and the Blue Sun logo from Firefly. I hoarded interesting scientific patterns like the DNA cable at http://www.twosheep.com/helix/ and the nautiloid models at knitty.com.

So again, while I will no longer call this blog Nerd Knits, I still think of it in that kind of category.

Hello World

So I'm not just a knitter. I suppose I should admit now that this blog won't just be about knitting. In fact perhaps the title is misleading. I do a lot more than knitting. Plus I have a short attention span and a lot of interests. So I can only guarantee that knitting will in fact be discussed at some point; not that it will be the only thing I will babble about, or that I'll say anything really relevant.

Great! Now that we're past that awkward introduction stage, I am excited to finally put this stuff out there. I have no idea if anyone else will be interested in the things I make, but I have wanted to share them for a while. So here goes nothing!