Just Add Water: Super Mario Blanket

Now that the shawl is done, the next project on the needles is a Super Mario blanket. Tim’s brother and sister-in-law are expecting a second baby boy, so Tim wanted to knit them a blanket, I said I would help.

This project had Tim’s brother in mind, he would get the inherent geekiness and love it. We, of a certain age, all played Super Mario Brothers, for many of us it was our first video game, if you don’t count Pong or Centipede. Has anyone noticed that all us 30 something-s out there, our toys are coming back? It’s very smart marketing tool, we must be a sentimental generation. We want to buy the toys we played with for our children (or nieces and nephews). Tim and I bought a Wii a few years ago and have played the newest version of Mario. Now, Mario and Luigi are in 3D, and can play together, at the same time. I love the collaborative aspect of it as compared to before, waiting around for the other player to finish so you could have a turn. Tim and I share in the geeky, that’s one of the many reasons why we make a great couple.

Tim doesn’t crochet, so that was out, that’s usually my go to for blankets. Since two people were going to knit it, it had to be in squares that are sewn together. We couldn’t find a pattern for this, so we decided to make our own by searching for the 8-bit images on line. The images are boxy and pixilated which made them easy to chart for knitting. We discussed a few ideas from knitting a scene, like the iconic opening World one Level one, but breaking that into squares was problematic. Tim wanted to be authentic to the original game, so we had to go another direction. We decided to knit characters in a blue square, then sew a row of bricks around each square.

We had a few discussions about the brick orientation and how we would sew them on. We decided no mitre corners, knitting the strip of bricks separately rather than picking up stitches.

Tim chose the characters he wanted, then charted them out in Excel, which worked out very well. We made sure to buy the correct colours of yarn, and off we went.