Pac-Man hat

Remember that one? I was addicted to it. I remember that it was summer and that my parents and I were out enjoying a nice, hot evening. Well, they were. I was with them, playing on my Gameboy. They thought I’d stop when it got dark, since this little screen didn’t give any light. But what I did instead was go and stand under the nearest street light, to make sure I could still see what happened.

Yes, I was a geeky kid. The games I played most often were Tetris and Super Mario. I was the kid my dad’s friends tried to beat in Tetris. They never succeeded. They never believed me when I told them that once they scored a 100,000, a little rocket would appear on screen. It would get bigger at 150,000 and 200,000. I don’t think I ever reached 250,000, though. And when you finished the game where you had to get rid of 25 lines at level nine, high 5, a real space shuttle would appear:

Seeing this made me a bit emotional and melancholic, to be honest. Pure youth sentiment.

Anyway, I also had the Pac-Man game, but that always made me nervous. Still, I never stopped loving the simple Pac-Man graphics. And neither did my husband. So why not make him a funky geeky hat?

It was the first time that I tried the double-knitting technique, where you knit a double layer: one on the inside, and one on the outside. Because of the different colours I used, the hat is blue on the inside and black on the outside. This makes it extra warm.

All in all, double knitting is not difficult at all. You just have to remember to bring your yarns back and forth at the right time, and to maintain your tension. It took some practicing, that’s for sure. And the tension on the inside is slightly looser than the one on the outside, but apparently that has to do with a different tension when knitting or purling. Purling is more loose than knitting. And since this pattern was knit in the round, the outside was knit at all times and the inside was purled at all times. I’ve searched for a solution for this, but I haven’t found any. Only the advice to learn to live with it. If you know the dirty little secret, please share!

I knitted this hat top-down. I started on dpns and once it got big enough, I switched to circular needles. I used a Turkish cast, which took me some efforts to figure out how to do it exactly, but by winding both yarns carefully around my needles, I got there in the end.

As for the maze and the dead enemy blue ghost, I incorporated those by switching the double-knitting yarns. Not very clear, hey? Well, what I mean is, I got them there by using the blue yarn for the front and the black for the back at certain points. This also means that on the inside, I got a black maze and a black ghost on a blue background. Get it? Here’s a picture to make it more obvious.

To create Inky (blue), Blinky (red) and Clyde (orange) and the pacdots, I used duplicate stitch.

 

I know, the fourth character is Pinky, and he’s not there. That’s because no matter what, I could not convince my husband that the pink character really had to go on there. So, instead, we’re stuck with a ghost.

But what about Pac-Man, I hear you ask. Well, that’s very simple. No hat without a nice pompom. And since pompoms are round, and Pac-Man is round, I created a Pac-Man pompom.

I also knitted a short I-cord to attach the pompom to the hat so that Pac-Man would be just at maze level. It’s a whole different way of playing Pac-Man. Swirl that head, baby!

Honesty bids me to say that I hadn’t attached the pompon very well and it did fly off after a couple of times… The Pac-Man can still be improved as well. Maybe by next winter.

So, how about you all? Any game addictions? Hidden geekiness? Surely I can’t have been the only one out there?