How Long Can It Go On?

I'm still knitting on the graphic stripe scarf.  Now got over 5 ft of it and there's still plenty of yarn left!  How much longer can it be?  Probably another 2 ft, but I think I'll stop at 6 ft.  That should be long enough to do that double-and-through-the-loop style that's so cool.  At least on other people.

But don't worry about my getting bored with doing the same thing for miles. This is my portable project, good for keeping me out of mischief while keeping the Grandboy out of mischief.  I can say without fear of contradiction that I have the pattern memorized by now, and it's easy to stop and start, say, when somebody climbs on top of the coffee table.

There's another project on the go that demands my full attention when I'm working on it, the Stefan's Dinosaurs cardigan for the aforementioned Grandboy.  It's a whole lot more complicated than I realized when I bought the yarn and plunged in.  (Duh! you quip sagely.  It won a competition.  It wouldn't be just a colorful little old intarsia.  It would have texture.)  And, boy, does it ever have texture!

It has texture moves I've never seen before, like slipped-stitch 2-color bunches of grass and subtle leaf patterns in the green areas, and rough, bumpy dinosaur skin.  Yikes!  You don't know the players without a program:

Now you understand why I have a separate portable project, right?  The body is done in one piece with a chart that I have stitched together from pieces of blown-up pdf files.  Not only have I learned new texture patterns, I've had to learn new computer tricks. This puppy has to stay on a table or desk with the place marker undisturbed!

I've changed the color scheme from the original.  For one thing, the background colors were shades of teal.  Teal!  I ask you--what self-respecting dinosaur would be caught roaming a teal-colored landscape??  Once the teal turned a more pleasing green, dinosaur colors had to shift. Here are the sleeves with some of the other colors:

I like my color scheme a lot better than the original.  Deep primary colors seem more attuned to the preschool aesthetic anyway, don't you think?  I mean, this sweater is for a guy who takes such a fancy to red one day that he colors the whole picture in the coloring book with it.  Staying inside the lines beautifully, but the ground is red; the sky is red; red figures in red vehicles doing red things with obvious enjoyment.  You don't dress a guy like that in teal.

Progress

I've finally finished the single-piece body of the Jali Cardigan and blocked it out:

It's not quite right, but I don't expect to be stopped by the Knitting Police and ordered to throw it away.  Now comes some sewing up and a great deal of stockinette knitting to put the collar/front piece on.  That part is major and will take, I'm guessing, the lion's share of the cone of yarn that remains.  Sort of boring, maybe, but it means I can watch subtitled foreign movies on my computer as I while away the rows (an activity which was absolutely impossible while I was counting lace stitches and cabling knots.)  I love the feel of it--it's going to be a fun light layer over a bright shirt this winter.

Meanwhile, having finally found the second yarn I wanted for the Strips of Stripes, I couldn't help starting the scarf [Ravelry link].  In San Francisco I acquired a mostly-black skein of Madelinetosh Tosh Sock in #5 graphite.  Nowhere could I find its opposite, white with a little gray, until Knit Purl in Portland, when a skein of Kathee Nelson Art Yarn Little Lambie in the "tweed" colorway lept into my hands.  Huzzah!  I cast on almost as soon as I got home.

It's very much like the original in the pattern photo (sorry about the Ravelry link above, but it's the only one I can find).  The stitch pattern is a combination of garter and slipped stitches that make a cool graphic look in black and white, but I think this is one I will knit again, probably with bright contrasting painted yarns.  I'm undecided about whether I will keep it or give it as a gift.  Do I know anyone in a cold climate who would appreciate it?