I took some time off of crocheting for a bit, but was back this week with a vengeance. Enjoy the photos!
Killing Floor
Now I have finally finished all of the squares for the blanket, and its time to begin putting them all together. Just a preview of what is to come.
Week two of my Epic Gamer Quilt was very successful. I managed to complete seven blocks this week, a huge improvement over last week.
The first block I created this week was the logo for Borderlands. I was a pretty easy logo to design, but as I was making it the only thing I could think about was how much the color scheme reminded me of McDonalds, which made me want french fries.
The Space Invaders block was next, which I created from Alicia’s Designs. This pattern was pretty easy to follow, but I messed up the counting in the middle, making part of the pattern off-center. Naturally, I didn’t realize this until after the block was done.
Following that, came the Team Fortress 2 logo. This block definitely looked better on paper. I couldn’t find the proper colors for the logo, which doesn’t help things. Quite possibly I was subconsciously taking revenge on this logo since I have spent many nights alone because my fiancée is way too addicted to this game. Or it could be that anything orange and circular just looks too much like a pumpkin.
After the disaster of a pattern, I went back to working on ones that someone else had written. The Black Mage came from Alicia’s patterns. Pretty easy to make, and finally I had a use for multiple shades of yellow. If you look closely you can see that my attempt to hide the tails peaked through in the face giving him a nose. I’m thinking I may leave it like that.
Next was metroid, once again from Alicia’s patterns. After finishing this one I was concerned that it was too ugly but I was assured that it is not supposed to be too appealing to the eye. Of course, now that its finished I’m too distracted by how off-center the image is. It looked better on paper, but I wish I had noticed before starting so that I could shift it down and over.
After the complexity of the metorid block, I decided to switch to something simpler and worked on a Halo block. This was originally going to be a Halo-3 block, but getting the number to show up legibly was really difficult, so I left it at the original.
Lastly came cute little Kirby, once again from Alicia. I have to admit, her version looks much cuter than mine turned out. It looks like mine ate way too much at the buffet before flying around.
Now I’m eleven blocks into the blanket. I have to admit, I’m feeling pretty good about it! Stay tuned for more nerdy blocks!
Earlier this week, I was browsing through Ravelry and beefing up my queue with more inspirations. While browsing the recently added patterns, I came across this amazing afghan project designed by Alicia. My fiancée is a huge gamer, and after I sent him the link he all but begged me to make one for him.
The past week I have been crocheting like crazy, and have been able to finish four blocks so far (quite an achievement for me since my other blanket has been progressing at a snail’s pace).
My first block was the Minecraft Creeper, which I created from Alicia’s design. This was a good pattern to start with, as it filled me with optimism that this blanket would be easy. This chart was pretty easy to follow, and the colors changing as blocks meant that I didn’t have to count, which is awesome since I hate counting.
My original plan was to create all the same blocks that were found in the original, but after discussing the blanket with my fiancée, I found myself talked into editing the pattern to include different blocks so that it featured some of the games that he loved but weren’t included. This means I get to try my hand at pattern writing.
For my second block, I wanted to do a Pokemon theme. In the same pattern pack as the Minecraft Creeper, there is an amazing Pokemon square, however I felt that was beyond my talents, so I decided to simply the design. This was my first attempt at writing a chart, but I think it turned out pretty well.
Be sure to check out the new patterns page for this website, where I will be adding the charts I created for this blanket.
After this challenge, I decided to head back to the original pattern, and created a Mega Man square. This was by far the most difficult square of the three, not because of the pattern itself, but with all the color changing I got all of my yarn tangled up. I think I spent longer untangling knots than I did working on the square. I modified the original design a bit to make the outer lines thicker, I also made the whole face white instead of switching to a skin tone. Mostly because I was too lazy to go out and buy a skein of brown yarn that only a tiny bit would be used from.
My latest creation was the cake icon from Portal. Again, I wrote my own chart for this one. It looked much better on paper than it turned out. I had trouble counting stitches on the black and it wound up being a tad distorted. Hopefully when I go to block the squares it will work itself out. If not, I’ll just not include it and tell my fiancée that the cake square was a lie.
Not bad for the first week of working on this project, if I do say so myself. I’m hoping to finish this before my fiancées graduation in June. Wish me luck, and stay tuned for more updates!
Blanket of Doom 
