Contest Entry - It's a tie!

No, not a necktie, silly. If money and skills were no object, it's a real toss-up between the Noni Medallion Travel Bag and the Garden cardigan from RYC Classic Garden Book II. I wish I had a picture of the cardigan. I love patterns with combinations of stitches, and this one has cables, bobbles, leaves, hearts, moss stitch. I'd actually take anything from that book. Hm...something by Kristin Nicholas would be up there in the top five "If I could..." list, too. So these two things sum up all the things I like most in my Knitting Life: felted bags, Rowan/Jaeger yarns and patterns, and, while not reflected here, if the cardigan were eight different wild colors it might be a Kristin Nicholas design! Yes, I splurged and bought her latest book. It's divine.

Right, then, question #2: What's my favorite blog? I refuse to pick just one.

As Erin the Business Geek:

• Manager-Tools, which is really a podcast site/blog. These guys have been a source of inspiration and sanity and, really, a saving grace more often than not in my work as an IT Manager, both when I was managing people and now that I'm managing processes and numbers. If you are professional and want some wisdom and a good laugh, check these guys out. They are a little like the Car Talk guys for business. In fact, I think I have the RSS feed posted to my own blog. Ha!
  
• Me, myself, and BI. BI=Business Intelligence, and I'll be the first one to start the oxymoron jokes. This is what Wikipedia has to say about BI: BI systems provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations, most often using data that has been gathered into a data warehouse or a data mart and occasionally working from operational data. Software elements support reporting, interactive "slice-and-dice" pivot-table analyses, visualization, and statistical data mining. Applications tackle sales, production, financial, and many other sources of business data for purposes that include, notably, business performance management. [Wikipedia page.] I'm the poor sap that not only puts these kinds of reports together, queries the data warehouses, but helps develop strategies to implement those processes in a department. I love doing this.

As Erin the Knitter:

• Before Eunny went over to Interweave Knits, I went to her blog regularly. She has some beautiful patterns, and she's always funny.
• knitspot is another frequent destination. I purchased Ann's Honey Bee Stole pattern in the hopes that someday I'll have the skills and patience to do lace.
• Let's not forget about Stephanie the YarnHarlot! Inspirational, funny, real, it just doesn't get much better, and I concur with her Feb 6 headline: Not enough coffee in the world. That's how I felt yesterday, too.
• As Erin the Silversmithing student, I hang out at Ganoksin, The Artful Home, and another Interweave 'zine, Lapidary Journal Jewelry Artist...oh wait, those aren't blogs. Never mind!
• When I'm not doing all that, I visit my Mom's blog, Okay...So..., and my little brother's blog about his kids, They allow us to have children.

You now know more about me that you need to or probably should. I didn't even add all the photography stuff...