Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Pac-Man dish cloths

I haven't posted any crochet patterns for a while, but all that is about to change. Why? Because I learned how to change colors within a row, i.e. tapestry or chart crochet, to make designs. And oh am I making designs.

Lots of people have posted charts online for Mario Bros. games and other early era Nintendo and arcade games, so I figured I'd add some to the group. Here's my first: Pac-Man and friends!


These are simple enough to do and create nice-looking dish cloths when you use cotton yarn. For each of these patterns, chain 29 and work in single crochet for each row according to the colors on the chart. You carry the colors over as you work rather than cutting them, so at any given point, you have 5-7 yarns attached to the piece.

I have Pac-Man and the four ghosts from the game. Pac-Man is yellow, the border is aqua, pink, orange, and red to represent his ghosts, and the background is black (made gray in the pixel chart below so you can still see the grid).


Each ghost has a yellow border with a black background (again, made gray so you can see the grid), and eyes are white and black. For this design, I left the ghost light gray because it is meant to work for every ghost color - aqua, pink, orange, and red.


These are really fun to make and have impressed everyone I've shown them to. Post a comment if you have any questions, and if you would like to learn more about how to change colors on tapestry crochet projects, click this link.

3 comments:

Sara Sherman said...

Very cute - but I'll stick to the afghans I make that don't make me change a million colors. Mom

Kateyboo said...

Hey

I'm going to have a bash at these but im going to try knitting them using the intarsia method. I am also going to make the coaster sized. i'll let you know how i get on :)

Great pattern!

Kate

Valerie said...

Great idea, Kate! Yeah, I don't provide much instruction for the method of color-changing, simply because others elsewhere have posted instructions already. Use whatever method you like, and be sure to post photos on Ravelry! :o)