Dmitri's Bucket of Projects

Thank you for the kind words of encouragement, everyone. And thank you, Kim, for the advertising ;). To the right is the scarf as I shall leave it for a while. I definitely wasn't going to give up and put the sticks down, because when you put the sticks down, the terrorists win. This brings me to several tangets. Usually when writing I try to follow a single train of thought, but today you all are not so lucky.

• "..the terrorists wins." Nothing quite like beating a dead horse when it comes to jokes. It's happening alot on one of the webites I read: AnandTech. There, the commentors are beating Yakhov's "In Soviet Russia" line to death (though most are attributing it to a line from Family Guy which itself was poking fun at the Russian comedian). Some of the comments are funny, most, not so much.
  
• Switching projects. Well the HTPC project is actually moving forward, slowly out of the planning stages. I got my PVR card yesterday, and will pick up a nice long Coax cable tonight to run the cable to it so I can start playing with it. I'm hoping to have the build wrapped up by the end of April. YAY!
  
• But what about the scarf? Scarf in my original idea is being put down, but I have a NEW knitting project idea!! A mini neck warmer/wrap! How's that different from your scarf, Dmitri? Well, the other scarf is for winter, general use. This one is much smaller and has one specific purpose: to cover my neck when I ride my motorcycle. It's not meant to be wind proof, the collar on my riding jack does that. It's just meant to help keep my neck warm on those 60 degree days when I'm cruising down the highway. It'll be small, maybe have two buttons, and may be felted. Thoughts?
  

    That's the question for my scarf. I've started this 5 or 6 times now, and I have to say, it is discouraging. I think the design I chose is not optimal for the combination of yarn and color from a learning perspective. I've no doubt someone with a lot more experience could whip through it without thinking. As project number two, I think it is beyond my grasp. The yard is very thin and the pattern uniform in spot so my tension needs to be much better than it is. I also need to stop trying to knit on the train. It moves too much and I'm not good enough to compensate yet. My first project went well, but I think that happened because I was doing a more forgiving project. And I was doing it, while sitting on my futon with good lighting, minimal distraction, and for at least and hour at a time giving me a chance to get into a rhythm.

    The question is do I change the pattern, change the yarn, or change the project? I'm thinking about doing the later, moving to a thicker yarn, and just doing a seed-stitch pattern. Before that, though, I want to work the 4-by-4 square to death. I want to study some of the other stitches, and more importantly learn how to fix a mistake without frogging. Oh, and practice my tension the whole time.

The scarf has been started yet again. I've frogged it a few times now, and I need to get moving on it or else I'm going to become bored with it and move onto another project. I've tweaked the pattern again, and hopefully it'll come out alright. I'm using the Rowan 4 ply soft mentioned on the February 13th post. The yarn itself is pretty thin, so to give it a bit more thickness, I'm using two strands from two skeins at the same time. It's making for an interesting look as the two strand occassional twist. I'll get a close up shot at some point when I get further along.


Doubling up on the yarn, I'm going 30 stitches across, which is roughly 6 inches. The pattern look likes this (start at the bottom):

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3 rows of seed stitch.

Lots going on the Home Theater PC front. I'm getting to a point where I want to get that project wrapped up. I've been neglecting my knitting, and I don't have a very good excuse. I highly recommend the Minish Cap, though it's easier than some other Zelda games, still it has been a fun romp so far. Now that I'm about to wrap it up, I want to whip through my scarf, which I did end up frogging. I'd like to finish that up in a coupe of weeks, before the weather gets nice, and any reason to wear it will disappear for several months.

News on the knitting front is slow. I frogged the scarf, and am trying to restart it. I'll give it some solid time on Thursday. I've been concentrating more on my HTPC lately. I've assembled the start of a Case comparison table. Right now I've only looked at the lines from Ahanix and Silverstone. I'll probably add CoolerMaster shortly since they made my main PC case, which I love.