Me and graph paper go way back. My dad had huge, irregular-shaped semi-transparent sheets of the stuff which I’d steal to draw out increasingly complex Hero Quest campaigns; I mapped at least half of Lords of Midnight with my friend Nick before his Spectrum started to give out an entirely different pitch of whine and the tape quietly tore itself to shreds; and in the endless weekends of youth, I’d use it to plan pixellated aliens and spaceships which I’d painstakingly code into BASIC before losing track of what exactly the game was I wanted to make.
So when Jenny asked me last winter whether I would like a scarf, my first reaction was to reach for a 2B pencil. And this was the result:
When I posted this image on Twitter last week, it generated considerable attention, so as a follow-up I thought I’d make a quick post about the design. Let me stress, first of all, that I know only just enough about the actual process of knitting to know what can and can’t be done. There are plenty of good video tutorials on how to knit, covering everything from the basic mechanics to more complex techniques like intarsia – creating patterns with multiple colours to form the creeper’s face above – so I won’t go into the actual process here. If you have any recommended tutorials, feel free to post them in the comments.
As pixel-art designs go, the Creeper pattern is a fairly straight-forward one to start with. It’s already visibly divided into pixels, and can be created with the use of just two colours of yarn, black and green. The real creeper design actually uses four or five different shades of green, but unless you have the patience to switch between balls of yarn every four or eight stitches for the entire length of the scarf it might be better to either pick a single colour of green or use a variegated green yarn as we did here. You can see the pixel design over to the right; 8 pixels across gives us enough resolution to render the whole of the creeper’s face.
Given that this scarf was knitted entirely in knit stitch – keeping things as simple as possible – the question then becomes how many stitches should make up a single pixel? When we designed this pattern we estimated that a pixel should be a 4×4 block of knit stitches. However, it became obvious as Jenny started knitting that stitches aren’t necessarily the same size horizontally and vertically. I suspect this may be something that varies depending on your individual knitting style, but in this case we ended up creating each pixel as 6 rows of 4 stitches each.
Guided by this principle, the first 12 rows (2 vertical pixels) are each constructed of 32 knit stitches (8 horizontal pixels) of green, before we start having to worry about the added complexity of intarsia knitting the black yarn into the pattern. The next 12 rows are 4 Green, 8 Black, 8 Green, 8 Black, 4 Green, to make the eyes. The third set of 12 rows is 12 Green, 8 Black, 12 Green, followed by 12 rows of 8 Green, 16 Black, 8 Green. Finally 6 rows of 8 Green, 4 Black, 8 Green, 4 Black, 8 Green finish off the face.
That’s the tricky bit done; after that, just carry on down with the green yarn until the scarf is as long as you want it or you run out of yarn. There you have it; a creeper to call your own, to gently warm your vulnerable neck with its soothing hiss.
