Stop to Smell the Cosmos

I’m one week in to my new Slow Productivity paradigm shift, and… I love it. I’m more relaxed, happy, and positive about work than I’ve been in months. I’ve spent time this week knitting in the evenings while watching shows with my family, and have even watched a few episodes all by myself. (My current binge watch is Star Trek: Voyager, because I never got to watch that one in the nineties.)

I did have a couple of long days at my desk that I’m feeling across my shoulders, but those “long” days were what I once would have considered a day where I slacked off and didn’t work much. Monday is the Labour Day holiday, and I’m even planning to take it off.

(For context: there were two days where I logged almost ten work hours, but the other two were around 8.5, which is a pretty comfortable length for me. Not so long ago, twelve to thirteen hours of logged work per day was not uncommon, and nine to ten hours was a “light day.”)

So, yeah, I’m feeling good about how this is going. Mostly because I’m actually feeling good, period.

This week, I was primarily focused on two projects:

1. Continuing to update my website, which I began last week while on holidays.

2. Publishing the Twisted Rope Fingerless Mittens knitting pattern, which I completed yesterday.

Website Overhaul

When you change templates, there are always some features you were using which no longer work, and some features you never had available to you before which you now do.

At the beginning of this week, my primary concerns were to find a way to get a blog sidebar back—which my new template doesn’t include, for some reason—and to make sure it was easy to navigate between pages in some sections of my website where the in-template navigation had gone away.

I found an excellent plug-in to solve the blog sidebar issue. It’s not as ideal as having it native to the template, but it works. I’m thankful for my lingering knowledge of basic CSS from back in the bad ol’ days of running a blog and a business on Web 1.0, because I was able to tweak the plug-in even more than the basics offered by the designer. I’m pretty happy with it now.

And fixing navigation was a matter of going and manually inserting links on pages myself. I still have one rather hefty list of pages to finish doing this on, but that project is coming along nicely.

In addition, while I’m focusing on my website, I’ve been streamlining some things and doing a lot of niggly back-end stuff to repair broken links and make the user experience smoother. Most of it isn’t going to be obvious to anyone but me, but that’s the way it should be—if a website is working well, you don’t notice it. If it’s annoying and difficult to find what you need, you do. I’d rather this work be unnoticeable.

New pattern: Twisted Rope Fingerless Mittens

This is one of those designs that’s been in the works for many years. (As most of mine are by the time they’re published.) A little over a decade ago, I made some sketches of design ideas in a notebook, and there was an early version of this pattern in there. At the time, I didn’t know how I would make those cable bands at the top and bottom work, but I knew there had to be a way.

Then, in February 2020, I finally started work on an even more complicated version of this design called Lothlorien Fingerless Mittens (which I’ll be releasing next). It was a major challenge to my skills, which is what I wanted, but when I finished the prototype, I knew I had to refine some of the more basic aspects of the design first. So I set that aside and began work on the Twisted Rope design.

The good news is, now that Twisted Rope is out, Lothlorien won’t be far behind. And there will be two lovely designs available for knitters wanting to tackle different complexities of projects.

It feels wonderful to finally complete these projects. They were supposed to be “fast and easy” designs to complete… but with my limited energy levels the last few years, I only worked on them sporadically. And that definitely made everything take longer.

Unblocked prototype of Lothlorien Fingerless Mittens.

In other news, this has been one of the most gorgeous summers we’ve had in the Peace Country in years. I was telling my husband this morning that it’s one I wish we could bottle, rinse, and repeat. And I’m so very thankful for it.

In fact, I’ve been practicing gratitude a lot this week, which has probably contributed to my healthier mindset. But, to be honest, it’s difficult to be grateful when you’re stuck in the quagmire. However, now that I’m slowly working my way out of the muck, I find that focusing on gratitude is accelerating the process.

And, as I so often do, I record the things I’m grateful for with my camera (such things as can be captured for posterity this way).

Napping cats beneath my desk.

A surprise petunia beneath my steps that reseeded itself from my planters last summer.

Bees in my cosmos flowers.

So many blooming cosmos flowers!

That my daisies haven’t died yet, despite my almost-total neglect. (I’m babying them a bit more now, hoping to save them. Daisies are my favourite flower.)

Neither have my hostas.

I have so much to be thankful for! (Including the chance to play with my camera this week.)

Happy Friday, friend! What are you thankful for this week?