Of Rats and Jen

You may or may not have noticed a new section on the sidebar here, and at my knitting and beading blogs as well. I’m now offering free knitting patterns of my own design, as well as free desktop wallpapers for your computer adapted from photographs I took.

I expect to offer a new desktop wallpaper monthly, with occasional bonus offerings for special occasions. (I just put up a holiday design today!) Knitting patterns – and perhaps, eventually, beadwork instructions and patterns – will happen on a less regular schedule as I have items worth offering.

I hope you enjoy these new items, and that they help to make your visits to my pages worthwhile.

Technorati : desktop wallpaper, free downloads, knitting

I’ve been with Blogger for about 3/4 of a year now, and I’ve long since gotten tired of seeing the same old templates for our blogs. Modifying the template is possible, of course, but it’s risky to make those changes without damaging things like items you’ve added to the sidebar, etc.

I was inspired this week to create yet another blog – but this one isn’t a public one. It’s called Folkcat’s Test Blog, and it’s nothing more than a laboratory for me to mess with a Blogger template as much as I want to get things right before I implement the re-design on an actual live blog.

Today’s task was to re-create the look for I Knit Around, my knitting and life adventures blog. I’m pleased with the result. It may not be as elegant as a more experienced and professional web designer could have created, but it’s colorful, it’s readable, and it’s distinctly mine.

And the bonus – every time I tinker with one of the blogs or my web pages this way, I understand the process a little better for the next time!

If you’ve visited here before, you may notice a large change.

I was beginning to find the previous, traditional web page more unwieldy than I wanted to deal with. Having become very comfortable with working with blogs, however, I realized that I could do everything I wanted my personal web hub to do with, yes…another blog.

As of Friday, September 23, I have made significant changes to the overall blog roster, including retiring five blogs and opening a single new one to take their place. On the sidebar under “Links” you’ll find the archives for those retired blogs still available.

There’s more work to do on finalizing the look of this page – and my others – but I can’t do it all at once. So keep watching, and I hope you’ll find my new, streamlined blogreality a pleasant place to visit.

Here it is – I’ll be updating over time, and adding buttons to the sidebar.