Computers really aren't my thing...

I finished my Aeolian a few days ago, but I haven't had the time/energy/lighting to take good pictures. I love this shawl. It turned out just like I hoped it would.

So that's that.

I have also been planning a vest.  I wanted to design my own cables and I did, which makes me feel awesome and like a sucker for punishment because I do not own chart editing software. I usually just sketch stuff out on notebook or graph paper and call it a day, but I can't find my graph paper pad (and if that first picture of the shawl is any indication, I may never find it on my desk... yeesh, it's a disaster area in there) and the pattern for the corner exceeds the number of lines provided on standard notebook paper.  So I'm learning to use an open source vector art program, Inkscape, which I picked up a while ago.

I am a sucker for open source software, and there's a substantial part of  me that wants to convert my computer over to linux just because it's open source. There are other reasons, too, but my complete technological ineptitude prevents the switch. "Surely you must be exaggerating," you think, but I'm not. It's been one constant war with computers for the last 6 years. My first computer was the spawn of the devil, so I'm willing to place some of the blame on her--we fought tooth and nail with a mouse that would move around the screen and open programs on its own, a broken left click and no "c" key, the ability to only print my papers out so that they would fit on a 3"x5" card,and windows Vista. Once I replaced her with my a newer, less willfully evil model, I had about 4 months of smooth sailing before disaster struck.  During a single semester of college, I crashed my computer so badly that it had to go back to the manufacturer and lost all my hard drive data including my thesis, broke the second one (a loaner from a friend) so that it wouldn't boot up past the "this is a Dell" screen, and disabled a keyboard on a school computer while trying to get my thesis introduction finished.

But I digress. Now that the charts are finished, I've started the bottom cable band after substantial amounts of math. Hopefully this thing will work. It follows my basic tenants of "stuff I prefer to knit," which are as follows: 1) longer is better--we did the crop top in the 90's and it was widely established to be a stupid idea; 2) everyone looks better in princess seams; and 3) continuous cables and shaping make my heart happy.

That corner... 

Hopefully my hours of math aren't lying to me and I've got my stitch and row counts right the first time through.