Slow Going

I am now paying for my past indiscretions. I started a Moebius scarf using chocolate brown wool and a variegated yarn. My intent is to use up the variegated stuff in a decent-looking project. I use alternate bands of the brown and variegated yarns. The color "blotches are further broken up by the use of seed stitch and slipped stitches. This technique works well and I'll post a picture as soon as the project is big enough to photogragh. The moebius has about 500 stitches per round, so it's a slow process.

On the design front, I'm stil working on the barcode project. It has been harder than I thought. Barcodes contain a LOT of information in a small space. When I expressed the code as knitting, I got a monster. First off, there is the problem of knitting single row stripes and all the loose ends vs. doing two-row stripes and doubling the size of the knitting. Even with strategic cheating the chart went from 124 rows to over 200. Not fun at all.

I've also discovered, that on an expanded scale, the stripes don't LOOK like a barcode. I'm working on a compromise between an "accurate" stripe pattern and something that "looks like a barcode". I did side-by-side samples that had the stripes inverted, that is, black on white vs. white on black. They are indistinguishable.