Yes, progress has been made! I frogged the darker blue and started in with the new color. It’s such a relief to have things back on track. I’ve been taking care of my arm- resting it, icing it, putting on hot pads.Knitting this scarf is something of a marathon and I have to keep myself going at a steady, yet easy pace or else I get tired and annoyed.

One new development in the method of my construction is that I’ve decided to chart out several key elements of the scarf on graph paper this week to make things consistent. Boxes are easy, but I want to make sure the rest of the pipes and bushes (hmm, that sounds kinda sexual…) are uniform. If they look halfway decent I might share them, but I’m very shy about these kinds of things.

Things are going quite slow around my neck of the woods other than working on little projects here and there. I was working on a costume for Dragon*Con, but got to work at the last minute and decided not to do it this year. I’ve also been a little sick all weekend so I haven’t actually been to the Con yet. I might go to the Masquerade tonight, but we’ll see.

And a big hello to all the international readers. Thanks for the emails and such. I can’t believe how many countries this blog is being read in- the Internet is quite amazing.

Everyone have a great week.

Hi friends! Welcome to the new home of the Mario Scarf blog. It’s exciting to own a domain that actual has something on it for once and is actually in my own name. I’m still learning about Word Press and have yet to set up my other computer that has Photoshop on it so things don’t look exactly as I want them to, but I believe things are moving in the right direction.

I know I promised a big picture update this past weekend, but life was much busier than expected and I also have a new challenge to contend with. I have a pinched nerve in my back that is affecting my left arm. It hurts to do just about anything with it for more than a minute- typing, sewing, knitting. I have to take frequent breaks, stand up, and shake out the arm. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still knitting and I’ve been typing my little butt off trying to get the code for this site nice and pretty, but I don’t have much to show for myself as of right now.

I plan to devote the rest of the afternoon and week to crafty endeavors including the scarf. I’ll also be working on a costume for Dragon*Con and some new handspun yarns for my Etsy shop. You can track the progress of those projects at my personal site: http://cassiecsmith.com.

Hope everyone’s having a great Monday and for those in Georgia, stay dry!

After working 14 hours yesterday plus a two hour round-trip commute, I was exhausted when I got home, but waiting for me was a package from Angelika! Six beautiful skeins of “Blue Topaz” Cascade 220. I did a little happy dance (Jason started laughing at me) and ripped open the box. My little happy dance turned into a full-blown victory dance when I saw the yarn and that it MATCHES!
I don’t know if Angelika knows about this scarf or blog, but I owe her BIG time for matching the yarn and taking the time to personally make sure my order was well put together. We almost had real-time email conversations about finding this yarn and one has to appreciate that kind of customer service.

Currently I’m working on a new website. I’ll be transferring the Mario Scarf Blog over there as well as adding a general craft/personal blog. I like Blogger, but I need a little bit more control over various elements of the blog. Stay tuned in the next week or so to see what happens…

I leave you this afternoon with pictures from my journey into nature at the Chattahoochee Nature Center this morning.

Yessss! Angelika has matched the blue for the scarf (turns out it’s #8906- kudos to those who guess right) and will be mailing me SIX skeins tomorrow. I can’t tell you how happy this makes me! I’ll probably be able to start work again on the scarf on Friday or Saturday and I can’t wait. It’s been fun working on my other projects (I was able to set up an Etsy shop with the free time), but it’s so sad to look at the scarf and know there’s nothing I can do with it. You can look forward to a major picture update this weekend when I get some work done!

As for the help, is anyone familiar with Drupal websites? I need help setting up a Drupal site on my server. I’ve used Drupal before, but it was set up for me by one of my boyfriend’s computer science buddies. I really liked the easy to update format of the site and want to transfer this website to something a bit more design-flexible. So if anyone out there can help, please email me.

Have a wonderful week!

I’m still here, promise. Things haven’t been too busy and I’ve actual had a couple of days vacation while the family I nanny for this summer is out of town. A wonderful woman name Angelika is helping me match my yarn at her shop and while I wait on that, I’ve been working on other projects and enjoying my time off.

Went to a Braves game with my dad on Thursday. We lost horribly to the Cubs, but we had great seats above third base and enjoyed some baseball stadium hot dogs.

The Cubs’ pitcher hit one of the Braves players and a huge fight almost broke out on the field. I’ve never seen Bobby Cox hustle so fast from the dugout. I didn’t even think that man could run.

I broke out the Gocco printer the other night. I’d been saving the last screen I had for a great idea and I finally got one. I found a great image online of hands doing a a knit stitch and decided to make some stationery. I’m still learning how to do layers with the Gocco, but I’m getting better.

This is how the cards turned out. Not bad, eh? Of course I bought green and blue cards to use because everything I make these days ends up being green or blue. Avocado green is one of my all-time favorite colors.

I also tested out Gocco’s Riso ink on Shrinky Dink plastic. It smells a little while it’s cooking, but it worked just fine. My test was done on clear Shrinky Dink plastic, but I printed about 8 more images on opaque white to shrink tomorrow on my last day off.

Here’s one of the blue cards I made with the Shrinky Dink version. Love this color blue.

I also got the chance this week to continue work on the sock yarn I’ve been spinning. I bought all this fiber back in May and having been working on this on and off since. Here’s what it looks like after stretching out for a few weeks.

Mmm, twisty goodness!

And this is the bag made from Noro wool that I plan to felt tomorrow. I looooove the wonderful stripey colors in Noro yarns. I already made my boyfriend socks from their line of sock yarns and he really likes the stripes, too. I can’t wait to see how this bag turns out.

A few posts ago I said that the scarf was over 8 feet long. It’s actually just over 6 feet long. Let’s chalk the two foot error to my poor measuring and math skills. I laid out the scarf on the floor today and used a rigid tape measure to get the real length. I’d had my doubts for a few days and wonder why I even posted the original length in the first place, but I think was excited. So, please accept my apologies about my misleading information and maybe someone out there can do the math and figure out how long this thing will end up being.

The pictures were taken for a popular video gaming magazine that I don’t want to reveal until the issue comes out. I’m sure their piece on it will take up a fourth of a page, but my boyfriend’s eyes nearly popped out of his head when I told him the name of the magazine, so I’m going to wait. It might not even be in the issue, but we only have to wait until late September/early October to find out. I took the pics exclusively for this magazine and I’m only going to post one, but I wanted it to be one of the whole scarf thus far. So here you go:

Obviously this wouldn’t be the one used for the magazine as the WALL is glaring at me on the left, but you can see the whole darn thing.

A lot of flack I get in threads around the net focuses on the lack of detail. Like I said in the FAQ post (a link to it can be found on the right) I plan on adding all the details in at the end. And it looks all wavy and weird because I used painter’s tape to make it stick to the carpet so that the sides wouldn’t curl under. But yeah, there it is in all it’s scarfy glory.

The good news: JASON IS HOME FROM JAPAN! He’s been gone for two weeks livin’ it up in the motherland of gaming and I’m so happy that’s he home. So yay.

Onto the bad news…. the yarn came in the mail today. I ordered four different shades of blue. None of them match. I put the colors on them so you could see that although they look similar in the images from Cascade, they look different in real life. So I’m back to the drawing board here.

And now I return the yarn I got and buy 4 more colors in the quest for the ultimate Mario Scarf Blue. New Knitters, beware of my mistakes and SAVE YOUR YARN LABELS!

I need your help again. I’d like to make a blogroll on the right that includes the blogs/sites that posted an article about my blog. Please comment or email me where you found out about this project so that I can give everyone credit and thanks they deserve.

PS: Email me with your blog and a quick description to add to a seperate blog roll.

A big shout-out to Dave, Amy, Lori, Wendy, San, and Kevin who met up at Joe’s Coffee in East Atlanta to talk, craft, and drink coffee. Joe’s is my new favorite coffee place since moving to East Atlanta- they have one of the best cafe au laits I’ve ever had and I was born in New Orleans. That’s sayin’ something.

A variety of crafts were represented this afternoon. Lori busted out her animal quilt and was hand-stitching the border.

Wendy started making a felt corndog and Amy worked on a huge crochet afghan throw. Dave busted out all these awesome fabrics (he’s got a hook-up with a company that makes heavy-duty bags, or something along those lines) and cool Japanese pattern books.

Dave took some pictures when I unfurled the scarf onto a table and that’s when we realized we both had sweet, sweet Nikons. So we took a picture of each other taking a picture of each other. Like cool people do in such situations.

This is the only picture you get of me because I look weird in all pictures. Maybe I’ll get one of my photog friends to take a decent picture of me with the scarf sometime. Until then, bask in the glory of my ridiculously huge forehead. (By the way, this picture belongs to Dave Coustan.)

The wait for the yarn is excruciating, which is why I love yarn stores so much – instant gratification. I’m doing my best to be patient. I’ve been spinning yarn to keep my hands busy before frogging furiously. I ordered several colors in hopes of finding a match. I mean, the colors might look the same on the computer, but it won’t matter until I see them in person side by side.

Also, I’m hoping most of you know about this already, but if you have a Google account, you can read your blog list in Google Reader. You just copy and paste the pages and will get the feeds whenever new posts are made. I’m sure a lot of you already know about this, but a friend mentioned that some people don’t. It makes blog-reading a streamlined experience, especially if you read a gazillion blogs like I do.

It’s back to the daily grind tomorrow and for most Georgians public school starts tomorrow as well. If you have anything to do with that, hope you have a great day! My boyfriend has his law school orientation tomorrow after he gets off the plane from Japan so think happy thoughts for him so that he can stay awake.

And for the people who won a little prize from me about the knitted binary message, here’s a little preview of your prize package: