Cotton Noodle

I’m Lisa and I make things for fun. This website is my little handcrafted home on the web, where I (infrequently) blog and (every now and then) document my sewing and knitting projects through a photo gallery.

Cotton Noodle is part of the IndieWeb, a rebellion against corporate silos, in favour of small, homegrown, quirky little websites, like back in the days when the Web used to be wonderful. The Web is still wonderful, you just have to know where to look.

Currently, I'm...

  • Knitting: a light blue cabled jumper. The pattern is Brooklyn Tweed’s Bronwyn, and the yarn is Studio Donegal’s Soft Donegal.
  • Sewing: a very dark green wrap dress. It’s the Named Kielo, in a gorgeous deadstock viscose jersey.
  • Reading: Dune by Frank Herbert.
  • Playing: nothing… but I did just finish Revenge of the Obra Dinn, which was great!

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Latest on the blog

Restyling the Cotton Noodle website

I’ve just redesigned the styles on this here website. This is its formal christening: I’m dubbing it version 2. How original!

There were a couple of reasons I wanted to redesign it - technical and aesthetic.

The technical side

I didn’t really have a lot of faith in the styling code I’d written before. I wrote the v1 styles as part of my migration to Hugo, and there was so much going on with figuring out all the tooling and building out a gallery. Although I did put love and care into the v1 styles, I was styling at the same time as figuring out how to even make Hugo templates, and re-learning CSS having not really touched it in anger since around 2005. I’d tried out BEM, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but I grew to hate how heavy-handed it was.

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52 book challenge: end-of-year reflections

I achieved my 2025 goal of reading 52 books in a year! It wasn’t easy, and I’m definitely not going to do it again, but I am so glad I did do it. I’ve read things I otherwise wouldn’t, I’ve pushed my perseverance, and I’ve developed some really good habits that I am hoping I can hang on to.

The full list of books I read is at the bottom of this post, but first, I’ll share some of my reflections now that the challenge is over.

What I learned

I found it hard not to gamify this. When under pressure I picked shorter and shorter books. Never under 100, as that was the minimum I set for my rule, but let’s be real - even 150 is a very very short book.

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Simplicity S3099 Dress Pattern Review

I recently got invited to a charity ball with a black tie dress code. I can’t resist a stressful project, so I decided that I’d make my own formal dress, despite only having two weeks’ notice. Why do I do this to myself?

Anyway, it worked out well, although certainly not drama free. There isn’t a lot of talk about this pattern online, so I wanted to add my thoughts to the world. Here’s a lightning quick review of the Simplicity S3099 dress sewing pattern, which I made in view B (full length), in a polyester duchess satin, with a polyester crepe-back satin for the lining.

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