Did you know that the original name for Pac-Man was Puck-Man?

Woo! It's almost Christmas! Which means that it's time to catch-up with any TV series we're behind on so that we can make room in our Sky+ planner for all the Christmas shows and films we want to record. So I'm now completely up to date on Doctor Who (how amazing were Capaldi and Michelle Gomez in those last two episodes? It's a shame the story let them down a bit) and I believe that we're going to tackle American Horror Story tonight and tomorrow.

In non-fandom related life, I'm surprised by how on top of things I am. The Christmas gifts shopping is almost done and the food is completely done. There is a turkey in my fridge as we speak and I am in no way terrified of cooking it because it's the first time I'm doing it all by myself. I'm armed with my mum's stuffing recipe and I'm pretty sure that I'll only have to call her once, in tears because "the turkey doesn't look right and I've ruined it!".

Maybe twice.

Seeing as my shop closed a week ago, I thought I'd be raring ahead with the knitting in all this free time but I've decided to give the shop an overhaul in the new year so I've been busy coming up with new designs. So the knitting has been plodding along at the same old pace.

I really enjoyed knitted the striped colours design for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles square so when I saw that GAL had done a similar one but for the much beloved Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde I knew that I had to do that one too.

Square number 16: Pac-man

I'm really pleased with this square and I love the 'wrong' side just as much as the 'right' side.

I hope to get another post in on Christmas Eve but just in case I don't get a chance (in between all the crying and attempting to cook), have a great Christmas and I hope Santa brings you everything you want <3

When There's No More Room in Hell, the Dead Will Walk the Earth

If you go back to my post about the Arsenal square I knitted, you will see that one of my husband's five favourite things is zombies (seriously, zombies beat me and made it onto the shortlist...zombies!). So I knew that I had to do a zombie square but I had no idea how to go about it. I didn't want to go with a specific TV show or film because that would be more about the film than the zombies themselves. There are a few shuffling zombie cross stitch designs out there that I could have adapted but with only 45x57 stitches, I could've only fit one zombie onto the square and without the others, that's not a zombie - that's the outline of a man walking a little tipsily.

Then I found this little beauty, designed by Hyraea and turned into a cross stitch pattern by carand88. It's a zombie cat! And it's perfect (purrfect?) because I've been looking for a way to represent our cats in this blanket that wasn't too girly.

Obviously, I had to change it slightly so that the design was two colours, which took a little something away from the pattern so I added flies to emphasize the rotting flesh aspect.

Square number 15: Zombie Cat

Weirdly, I think it looks better on the reverse side with the red cat on a green background.

I'm not sure that this was a complete success but my husband likes it and it means that we got our cats on the blanket so I'm happy to leave it as it is.

You wouldn’t last five minutes in a Ninja pizzaria!

Time for square number 14 of the Blanket of Doom and I turned to the Geek-a-long.

I don't know about you but there was a period of time where every single day after school I'd have to watch 'Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles' on TV. It didn't matter how many times I'd seen a particular episode, I'd have to watch it again - you know, just in case I'd missed anything the twenty previous times. And I believe that it was the same for pretty much all the kids of my generation. What do I base that belief on? Probably the fact that  I can name three items of TMNT clothing my husband owns, just off the top of my head. It doesn't matter that we're (apparantly) grown-ups now, the turtles were such a big part of our childhood that we all still love them.

The GAL TMNT squares was one of the ones that first attracted me to the whole blanket project so it had to be done; even if the original plan changed from making a blanket for myself to making one for my husband, it still worked.

Square number 14: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

I seriously love this square. When I first looked at it, I thought it would be more difficult than it was. I don't know why; when you think about it, it's pretty obvious that you're just knitting stripes as the contrast colour instead of a solid contrast colour. But even my best friend asked how I did it, then gave a slightly disappointed 'oh', when I told her. I guess it's just one of those things that makes you look like a Master Knitter when actually anyone can do it :D

If There Were No Luck Involved, I'd Win Every Time! [Square #13 and a free chart]

A fair few years ago now, my husband was really into playing online poker. In fact he became a bit obsessed with the game in general. He got some books by the pros and we'd watch it on TV a lot; especially the World Series of Poker. I even bought him a Phil Helmuth bobblehead for Christmas a couple of years ago.

The obsession's waned a bit these days but we still watch the occasional televised match, usually when Victoria Coren-Mitchell's playing because, let's face it, she's awesome.So it was a no-brainer to put some kind of poker-related square into the husband's blanket.

I decided to keep it simple and go for Pocket Rockets and obviously use 'the prettiest card in the deck' as one of them. Unsurprisingly, I couldn't find any poker knitting charts out there so I made my own.

Square Number 13: Pocket rockets (aka a pair of aces)

The cards are a little squat and fat, more square than rectangle, so maybe if I made them again, I'd squish the cards in a little more width-wise. Weirdly though, I quite like them looking squarer, there's something aesthetically pleasing about squares inside a square - but maybe that's just me.

Anyway, if anyone wants to make this, I've added the chart below. It's unaltered from when I originally made it so you may want to fiddle around with it to make the cards more rectangular. If you do use it, please credit me and I'd love to see whatever you've made.

Hey, listen!

I went back to the Geek-a-long blanket for the next square. I was in a videogame kind of mood because we'd just been writing our Christmas lists and I was getting all excited about Santa maybe bringing me Kingdom Hearts 1.5. So I went straight for the vidogame squares and zoomed on the Legend of Zelda one.

Funny story, me and my husband almost got Zelda tattoos this year. It was our 10th wedding anniversary and we wanted to do something special and meaningful and came up with the idea of tattoos. We didn't want actual matching ones but liked the idea of tattoos that were different but linked so our first idea was him getting an 8 bit Link while I got the heart containers. Then we toyed around with each having a different Katamari Cousin pushing a different katamari and eventually settled on and got Princess Bride tattoos (I got The Revenge with 'Inconceivable' and he got the Dread Pirate Roberts mask and crossed swords and 'As you wish'). But it all started with that Zelda idea.

Square number 12: Triforce

I love how bright this square is knitted up in golden yellow and kelly green. It's also nice to have a Triforce chart that's more than just the three triangles that you usually find. Good job, GAL.

The Happy, Froliking Reindeer *ahem*

I've finished that hat I was telling you about (and am now back to the Banket of Doom grindstone) so I thought I'd do two posts today; one for the hat and one for the next square.

Last winter my husband told me about a new jumper that Queens of the Stone Age had come out with "in that knitting type style, you know what I mean". This was before everyone and their brother had printed fair isle t-shirts so he had to pull a picture up on his phone for me and I saw this pretty hilarious jumper.

But I had the feeling that it would be even funnier if it was more pixilated and knit-like or, even better, actually knitted.

Then I forgot all about it until a few months ago when I was looking for a hat to knit for a friend and stumbled across Kat Mcab's Frolicking Deer Hat It was perfect and when I showed it to my husband he got that puppy dog look which means he really wants me to make him something. Of course, I was busy with the blanket and the giant queue of stuff behind it so I couldn't start it until last week when we went visiting the in-laws and I didn't want to take a huge bag of wool with me.

I went with a lovely wine colour and a contrasting silver grey. It took about a week to make as you're basically making two hats in order to make it double-sided. That was probably a good thing because it meant I only worked on the 'parental friendly' side of the hat while at the in-laws.

Here is the finished hat, modelled by my very camera-shy husband.

Parental friendly side of the hat

Non-parental friendly side of the hat

Kat states on the pattern page that this is an XXL hat but I found that the width was fine because the doubling up made the hat very thick and warm. It did, however, make the hat very long which looks good on my husband but I think I'm going to have to find a way to make the hat shorter when I make one for my father-in-law. Of course, because he asked me to make him one based on the fact that he'd only seen the non-naughty side, I'll have to come up with a new pattern for the other side of that hat anyway.

You are a Member of the Rebel Alliance, and a Traitor

I'm still working on the mischievous winter hat for my husband so I haven't knitted any new squares in about a week. At this rate my posting of the squares will catch up with my making of the squares and then I'll be in all sorts of trouble.

As you already know from my previous posting of my husbands five favourite things, he loves Star Wars. The fact that he's a Star Wars and I'm a Star Trek fan is probably the biggest point of contention in our marriage ;) But he did take me to see both of the new Star Trek films at the cinema so I guess I'll go and watch the new Star Wars films with him.

He's pretty firmly an 'Original Trilogy Only' fan and doesn't really stray into the expanded universe of the books and the rest (which turned out to be a good thing when they were suddenly declared not-canon). So when I drew out the design for the Geek-a-long's Jedi Order Square his comment was 'I didn't know the Jedi Order had a symbol'. Oops, I guess that comes more from the expanded universe? I really don't know. So, with all apologies to the Lattes and Lamas' girls, I had to leave that particular design and look for something a bit more recognisable.

To be fair, this is Star Wars we're talking about so it was probably less than 10 minutes of searching before I found Linda's cushion pattern.

Square number 11: The Rebel Alliance

My best friend's husband (who's an even bigger Star Wars fan than mine) usually ignores our BFF crafty squees chats but this time said 'You should make an Empire one too', so I'm counting this square as a win :D

Also, I don't know why the red looks hot pink in the first pic but it's definitely red and not the Disco Rebels insignia instead.

Say It Ain't So

I've been away again, this time visiting my in-laws, which is why I haven't posted anything here for about a week. I also didn't make any squares while I was gone because I didn't want to lug around a huge bag of wool in different colours for different squares - I did take two balls of wool though to knit a (slightly naughty) hat for my husband and I'll post pics of that when it's done.

On the plus side, as a result of being away, I have finally got around to watching the first three seasons of American Horror Story and can now get on with watching season 4.

Okay, back to the Blanket of Doom. When I first mentioned making this, I showed my husband the Geek-a-long page so that he could see examples and he excitedly exclaimed "They've made a Weezer square!". Unfortuntely, he was looking at GAL's Wonder Woman square which also employs the flying W that Weezer use as their logo. He looked so crestfallen when I pointed that out that there was no way I couldn't make him a Weezer square for his blanket.


Square number 10: Weezer

So I basically took the flying W from GAL's Wonder Woman square then, just to completely seperate the kickass band from the kickass superhero, I added an arty circle around the design. A pretty simple square really but I think it's effective.

I knitted it in spring green and baby blue but any colours will work.

This is a design that I made for my own personal use and is not endorsed by or being used by Lamas and Lattes or the official Geek-a-long blanket. I am merely a fan of their project and have decided to make my own version. Don't forget to visit the Geek-a-long page to show your support for the official Geek-a-long blanket project which is raising money for a great cause and if you'd like to donate to that cause then please visit The Child's Play Charity here.