Finished project - Manic Miner oversized scarf

 

After a few months of Fair Isle knitting, I can safely say that I've got to a point where I *think* I know what I'm doing with two colour work, and to test this I thought I'd knit something simpler than the (slightly nightmarish) "Ugly Sweater" which regular followers of the blog have seen me struggling with. 

A scarf is pretty easy to knit. You start with a stitch count for width and just knit until you A) get completely mind-numbingly bored with knitting new rows or B) run out of yarn (I did both!)

When you're knitting a design though, it's slightly trickier as you have to plan what you're going to knit first, then you have to draw some sort of a chart to follow (thank goodness for my daughter's old discarded maths books with their lovely gridded paper). Finally you have to be extremely good at counting the 'background colour' stitches vs the design colour stitches. 

When I first started the scarf, I didn't really plan out how the designs would fit into the width of the scarf at all (in fact it was

only from Eugene onwards - the Humpty Dumpty character shown above - that I managed to crack this!)

As I progressed though things got easier but one absolute GODSEND was the art of doubling up each 'pixel' in the designs. This meant that on the right side rows I'd begin the design, and on the wrong side rows, I would merely add the same row pattern again to 'double up'. 

I chose Manic Miner, a ZX Spectrum Game as the influence for this design. 8 Bit graphics are brilliant as knitting chart patterns, purely because they're usually low coloured and are pixel based so it's easy to transpose these to a knitting chart almost like for like. 

The tricky part was working out how to double width / height so that the designs didn't look stretched. It took a while to get into the flow of blowing a design up slightly (particularly trying to count individual pixels) but this is where a computer comes in very handy - a screenshot of a game blown up automatically pixellates anyway so you can draw your chart straight from the source. 

One thing I realised very quickly is that Fair Isle chews through yarn at a rate of knots so it's worth being aware that however much yarn you think you'll need to knit a 10ft long scarf you'll need at least twice if not three times the yarn you think you will!

Last thing was getting the scarf to flatten out. As you're knitting Fair Isle, the fabric does naturally curl in on itself and it's not as easy to block out a 10ft long scarf as it is to block out something like a sweater. In the end I opted for tightly rolling the scarf into a tube in the opposite direction to the curl, keeping it bound up like this for about a week before unfurling it (and thankfully it mostly worked!)

A fun make though! I'm considering turning this into a proper pattern, but obviously don't want to incur the wrath of whoever owns the copyright to those character designs. Either way though, as a piece of fan art it's a suitable homage to one of my favourite games and now makes me wonder what designs I could work into a piece of knitwear next?