My niece is into video games, so for her 13th birthday, I made her this blanket. As a little kid, she played Super Mario Bros. on her folks’ NES, so I found this awesome pattern from Instructables that mimics the 8-bit style of those early games. The pattern is for the original Mario, but I made some alterations to the pattern so the colors are a bit more modern. Instead of SuperSaver, I used Red Heart Classic (the flesh tone is called Sea Coral, other colors are Cherry Red, Olympic Blue, Nickel, Yellow, Middle Brown, and Black). Know how to crochet granny squares? This blanket will be easy to make. And even if you don’t know how to make granny squares, Google exists, so it’s no problem. Everything I know about crochet and knitting I learned from YouTube videos.

This blanket got some love on reddit, so I figured I’d share it here. Also, it’s 11:30pm, and I’ve got to get something posted here to continue the Ultimate Blog Challenge. Yeah, I work best under pressure.

Some more notes on my version of the pattern: The Instructable says the total cost was about $25.00. That must be in 1985 money, because it cost me more than four times that much. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that I used way more yarn (28 skeins of RH Classic) and bought online instead of at Wal-Mart (I can’t set foot in Wal-Mart because of a personal vendetta – that’s another blog post, though).