teevee

*dusts down blog, mumbles incoherently into microphone* how's it going knitterm8s? hope you are all well and ting.

Thought this possibly merited a post. I knitted a TV!

A friend at work is leaving, he wrote a lot of the code for the TV / PS3 version 3 of BBC iPlayer. He's also a thoroughly bloody nice chap, frighteningly smart and yet more than happy to spend any amount of his time helping out less awesome coders like me. So I thought this would be a fitting leaving gift to say thankyou, and a nice ornament for his new desk.

Ravelry link is here. The pattern is based on TV Guy from Knitting Mochimochi with a couple of modifications:

• The screen. I based this on the iPlayer for TV category selection screen.
  
  

  It was something of a challenge to realise the full user experience vision on a screen resolution of 15 x 18 stitches.

  I basically got rid of all the text and reduced all the user interface elements to their simplest form. Each programme is an intarsia square. (This was facilitated marvellously by the serendipitous arrival on my doormat of last month's Knit Now magazine with a load of free yarn bobbins.) The centre programme is focused, so it has a pink border. I didn't have any pink yarn but I did have some pink embroidery thread so I chain stitched around the central square. The navbar at the top is backstitched on with a pink cross stitch for the position indicator.

  It was tricky to represent the semi-opaque squares at the side. Semitransparent yarn is difficult to come by, so I held a strand of grey and a strand of black yarn together for this. This was a great leftovers-using-up project, I just delved into my big bag of vaguely-aran-weight oddments that I can't quite bring myself to throw away.

• Three pin plug
  
  It's a UK based telly so I added an extra pin. I crocheted the pins instead of knitting i-cord, this made them a bit thinner so I could fit the extra one on.

I toyed with the idea of making an icord CAT5 cable at the back to make it a connected TV, but was talked out of it by everyone i suggested it to. I do have a tendency to get carried away with detail, and it might have made it look a bit cluttered, so it's wireless. I know it's an analogue CRT tv, so is pretty damn unlikely to have wifi capability, but I felt I had to sacrifice some technical authenticity here; chubby oldskool tellies are just cuter and more recognisable than flatscreens.

It was loads of fun to make, I had forgotten how good making toys was! And my colleague very much liked his leaving prezzie :)