I meant to start last year with this series of knots, but I lost them in the fall move. Being one of those people, I stewed and searched instead of just retying them until late 2009. Of course, when I had retied 1.5 letters I then found the originals. Like wearing a rain coat to ensure that it won’t rain that day, I should have started retying sooner. 8) In any case, we start with a ‘K’. Clever people like you can probably guess why, but if not, all will be revealed shortly. The ‘K’ is tied with a series of square flower knots with a hexagonal flower knot in the middle. I initially thought I might need to tie a heptagonal or octagonal flower for the centre to get the branches of the letter at the correct angle, but a test with a hexagonal centre proved to be close enough to perfect for the job. You might ask, why does the picture look more terrible than usual, well… It’s a new year and much is new including, sadly, my hard drive but not my computer. Hardware failure is always so depressing especially when coupled with backup system failure. sigh Also, all that material that I was collecting, procrastinated in posting, but still collecting is all gone. I’m hoping that we won’t have to do a full professional data recovery thing because it’s very expensive (as I know from previous personal experience). So we’re slowly fiddling first.

In an attempt to bootstrap as quickly as possible, I’m trying to continue forward with mostly open-source software which means GIMP vs Photoshop. The learning curve is annoying (but still quicker than digging through the inadequately labeled boxes in my basement looking for CDs. All of which means that I’m backdating the first post of the year and the pictures suck (although the bigger ones are better) but I’ve found some online tutorials that should help with the last part.

While I didn’t quite reach my goal of posting daily last year, I did end up with 120 entries which I think is still pretty spiffy. It’s a new year, the slate is clean, let’s be knotty. 8)