Blue Scarf for Mum

Blue scarf knitted for my mammy

Some time ago, I knitted a scarf for my mum. It was knitted with love, but honestly, the materials weren’t great, and there was no skill or pattern to speak of. Still, I would see her wearing it from time to time, and feel such joy that she was wearing something I made, me! But then I’d feel a flush of embarrassment because really, she deserved much better.

By now I have gotten a lot more skilful, so I made her a much improved scarf, with a pattern by Kristen Hanley Cardozo. Mum made me so many lovely jumpers when I was a kid, and even a fancy shawl for my communion, but I didn’t appreciate them at the time half as much as she deserved! This is my way to say thanks.

Well, hello!

“Well, hello!” in hot pink and candy colours, styled by CSS

Just how far can we push CSS styling on text? Pretty bleedin’ far these days.

This is an experiment in CSS typography. Live version here »

The text is fully select-able, copy-paste-able, and accessible. Many of the effects are hung on spans, of which there are over a dozen, so semantically speaking, it’s a bit naughty. If the characters weren’t different shades I could have gotten away with a lot less span spam.

The letters are squeezed together with a bit of negative letter-spacing, and this has the odd effect of clipping the text-shadow in pretty much everything except Chrome. IE9 is not equipped to deal with text shadows, which lessens the impact a lot.

The Joy of 15mm Needles

15mm knitting needles with super thick orange yarn

I’m a bit behind schedule with some of the gifts I’d planned to make lately. I’m currently working on a fairly fine scarf for a friend of mine (fingering weight on 3mm needles), and it is taking forever.

So I took a cheeky break to tackle this gloriously thick merino, with the biggest needles I own. The big guns—15mm.

Oh, the speed! Oh, the luxury!

What a shame winter is over and I won’t get too much wear out of it til autumn…