Kirby Crochet.

I've been working on my super-secret-mission project again, which is bound to someday shortly become my not-so-secret-mission project....

I was playing the original Kirby's Dreamland on my Gameboy the other day and decided that Kirby would be wonderful to crochet.  I started planning everything out yesterday, and finished all of the crocheting and finishing work today.  Here is the Kirby's Dreamland-inspired crochet piece:

I did this one a little differently than I've done in the past.  Before, I've noticed that my gauge isn't perfectly square.  I would plan everything out on graph paper and be extremely disappointed when the finished result was a super tall and skinny version of what I had drawn (such as Donkey Kong).  This time, I measured my gauge in advance.  It turns out that I have 15 stitches and 12 rows for every 4"x4" square.  Then, I used excel to plot out my design by changing the row and column heights to match my gauge.  This way, I could compensate for the non-square gauge by being able to see what the actual finished piece would look like in advance.  So nice!  I'll have to devote an entire post to the process of this one day.

Good thing I was once obsessed with collecting yarn before, which means that I pretty much always have the right colors I need for crocheting these 8-bit  designs.

I want to try and make sure that I have very recognizable games, but yet that they are still a little bit out of context, in that I don't exactly want to replicate a scene exactly.  That way, I feel like there's at least a little bit of artisticness going into it rather than precise alikeness?  Not to say I don't love perfect scenes down to the pixel, but for this particular project I want the characters and games almost somewhat extracted from their environment. 

Ideas for the next one? 

Donkey Kong Crochet.

I'm going to knit/crochet entire screenshots of old 8-bit or 16-bit games.

I started with probably my favorite one...Donkey Kong.  I think I love Donkey Kong even more now that I've seen the movie The King of Kong:  A Fistful of Quarters.

It's made out of Tunisian (or Afghan) crochet.  I wish I could do this stuff on the train to school, but it requires at least 4 skeins of yarn at a time and using an 18 inch double-ended crochet hook.  I kind of like to be as small as I can manage on the train so that people don't hate me for taking up their space. 

Here is a list of some other games I've thought of doing:

• Secret of Monkey Island
• Pac-Man
• Space Invaders
• Mario 
• Joust
• Defender
• Root Beer Tap
• Excitebike
• Dragon's Lair
• Centipede
• Frogger
• Dig Dug
• Asteroids
• Tetris

Tell me any that I've missed.  The more pixelated the game is, the better.  Also, the more awesome the game is, the better!  I need around 8 of these huge panels in total for my secret mission project.  I just like to call it a secret mission project so that I can feel like a secret agent.