Here I am, part of the Men Who Knit webring, and I honestly can’t remember the last time I posted about knitting. “Who cares, no one reads this anyway,” you say? Okay, yeah, you’re right. But who isn’t up for a little linguistic masturbation from time to time, eh? If anything, at least it keeps my writing (read: rambling) skills bright and shiny. And, hey, at least Lenore probably reads this thing occasionally. Right?

Anyway, where was I? Oh, right, knitting. So, yeah, I haven’t posted about knitting in a while, but I figured I’d share a little project I whipped up recently. It’s a hat. Yeah, fine big deal, a hat. But it’s a special hat. Wanna see it? Of course you do! You wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t, right? Okay, here it is:

Pacman Beanie

Pretty cool, eh? Cooler yet, I actually designed this thing myself! Though, admittedly, I didn’t actually go through the effort of grabbing the graphics out of the game… a little search for “pacman ghosts” turned up this link, and voila! I was off to the races (oddly, that link is to a website called Sprite Stitch, a, quote, “Video game inspired craft weblog”… apparently I’m not the only one who had this idea). Once I had the graphics, it was a simple matter of charting out the pattern on graph paper, finding some yarn with the colours I needed, and then whipping the thing up.

Of course, charting the pattern did take a bit of effort. The trickiest thing when translating an image into a knitting pattern is altering the images to match your row/stitch gauge. You see, my knit stitches aren’t perfectly square. In fact, they’re a little wider than they are tall. But the images in your average video game are designed to be presented on a display with square pixels. The result is that, if you convert the images directly to a pattern, they come out distorted. So you have to either alter the images to stretch/squish them as necessary, or alter your row/stitch gauge. I opted to alter the images, squishing them horizontally, which was actually a bit challenging, as they’re already very low resolution. But I think the result is pretty nice.

But the question now, is, what next? I’m thinking another classic video game of some kind. One of the Mario Bros. characters, maybe? Or maybe something a little more obscure… Opa Opa, anyone?