I am the Kat that Walks By Itself

Howdy, friends and strangers!

This is my intro post. I figured I'd better have one.

This journal is a mix of fannish stuff, ponderings, computer geekery, craft and random cookery experiments. More personal posts are friends-locked, some with tighter filters than others. ( things you should know about me )

Where you can buy my work:

• My Print-on-Demand designs at RedBubble. (t-shirts, art prints, mugs, pillows, throw rugs etc etc)

( other sites of mine )

Transformative Works Policy

If you wish to transform my work, I have Transformative Works Policy to clarify stuff in advance!

Other stuff

If you want to write fic for me, here is my Generic Ficathon Elaboration Post.

After you have friended/subscribed to me, I would appreciate it if you drop me a comment here, saying hello and what brought you here. No need to ask permission beforehand, but it would be nice to give me a note afterwards.

The absolute minimum you need in order to start knitting. Part of a series.

Knitting in progress

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I can't remember whether I posted this here or not. But I thought it would be fun to share this little ditty I wrote a while back about why I LOVE crochet.

Some crafts have come and gone
Other crafts have stayed
But now at last, I've found a craft
That puts them in the shade.

Throwing pots gives lots and lots
Of creative mess, both grave and funny
But you need a kiln to fire your pots
And that costs lots of money.

Oh let me sing the praises long
Of the craft that's called crochet
The cost is low, for all you need
Is hook and yarn to play.

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For a while, I had a wordpress blog at https://essence-of-eclectic.blog -- it is still there right now, but I haven't been posting to it for a while, and it costs $$ to keep it there. So I'm going to take it down. But many of the posts there are worth keeping, so I'm going to be re-posting them here. So be prepared for a bunch of new old content coming up. Not sure how long it will take to do, or what will be the easiest way to do it, but it will be coming soon. No way will it be as fancy as it was on wordpress, but at least the essential content will be there.

I know many people advocate that one keep separate blogs for separate topics/audiences, but it is just too much bother for me. I don't care. If I'm going to have a blog, it's going to be just as eclectic as I am. So that's me, here. So there. (sigh) I hate being told what to do.

How many of you maintain multiple blogs?

As you may have noticed, I've started posting stuff again. I have no idea what y'all been doing, as I've been away from DW for a while, because Stuff.
As trying to catch up with everything that's happened with you all is so daunting it would make me crawl under a rock again, please do tell me here what you've been up to, major events I ought to know, or like anything you want to say.

Hi everyone!

Go and check out my new arty blog essence-of-eclectic.blog!

I've made this a separate WordPress blog because

1. Dreamwidth is kind of frustrating in its really primitive user interface for pictures.
2. It's really nice to be able to just take a photo with my phone and then blog about it.
3. It enables me to be more focused in my writing about art/craft, having a separate blog for it.

Not that I'm necessarily going to stop posting here about art/craft, but half the time I'll be linking to posts I made there instead.

So go and check it out! Make comments! Look at the pretty pictures!

Very restrictedly back. Only following a handful of people at the moment, only on DW and LJ. Not following anyone on Twitter at all, and probably not going to even go there. I mean, I mainly started on Twitter because I was following lizbee and RJA, and now that RJA is back on LJ, and lizbee still posts on DW, the only thing I'm missing out on is cat pictures. Hey, anyone want to post some cat pictures?

I've got filters set up on LJ so that I can friend more people than I'm actually looking at -- clever thing that someone pointed out to me a while back: you can filter out all of someone's posts by filtering by tag, and making the tag in question a non-existent tag, something that is very unlikely to be used as a tag in the future. Originally I used it so that I could filter out the people I was following on DW who were cross-posting to LJ. Not quite as good as the DW method of separating subscription and access, but I'll take what I can get. Right now, I want people who had access to locked posts to still have access to them, even when I'm not up to following everybody.

My friends-groups on LJ are a complete mess, since I was un-friending people willy-nilly -- I was un-friending EVERYBODY, which of course meant that all my friends-groups ended up with nobody in them. So I've been putting people back, but I can't remember all of them. I think the most important ones are the "christians" and "theists" groups, since they contain posts which I think are only relevant to those who are Theists and Christians. So if you think you fit into either of those groups, and would like to be added to that filter, let me know. Beware, they may contain things like requests for prayer!

Also, if I have recently un-friended you and not re-friended you, let me know; as I said, purged everybody, and I may have missed some when putting people back.

I'm afraid my social media stuff is too much for me (again) and I am going to have to cut back on whom I follow. So if I unfriend/unsubscribe you, please do not be insulted.

Stumbled across this in my websurfing: "I'm not telling you it's going to be easy. I'm telling you it's going to be worth it."

My first thought was "if it was easy, it would eventually be boring". We actually do like challenges. When we have enough energy and have rested enough from our stress, we do stuff. Human beings are kind of crazy when you think about it: we do difficult things for fun! We are so needy for mental stimulation that we invented these things called "games" which make us think hard when we don't have to!

Weird.

Relatively recently I signed up for Pinterest, because they had changed their interface such that one couldn't look at pins unless one was signed in (there was a Stylish workaround, but it no longer worked). Perhaps I should have gone off in a huff, and refused to join such a non-open site, but I missed being able to look at people's pins. Because there's an awful lot of good craft stuff there. And I really like looking at craft tutorials and examples of other people's work for inspiration. So, I joined. But I was sufficiently in a huff that I didn't join as Kerr Avonsen, but used another handle.

I joined and started pinning things as well as looking at pins. But I wasn't pinning tutorials (those I was bookmarking and/or saving offline with Scrapbook). I was pinning inspirations. Because images is where Pinterest has its strength. And I wanted to be able to look at pictures of fantastic wire-work, and freeform crochet, and clever jewellery ideas and so on. Before I knew it, I had four boards with over three hundred pins between them.
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