I wish I had a blue shell of death for my morning commute. 

Welcome to the 2016 Geek-A-Long! 2015 was a wild ride, and this year is going to be even zanier. Before I get into the square for this week, let’s do a quick recap: We’re working with a new yarn this year, Louet Gems Worsted. The amazing people at Louet are donating 50 cents to Child’s Play Charity for every skein of Gems purchased to make a GAL blanket. If you missed the announcement, you can get all of the details here. And, if that weren’t exciting enough, instead of choosing all of the fandoms ourselves this year, we invited you to duke it out and nominate your favorite games to put on the blanket. You can see the full fight here and the summarized results here.

The theme for the 2016 GAL is video games and we are starting off with one of my all time favorites, Mario Kart. When we opened up the forum for voting, we knew there was a high likelihood that you guys would nominate games we had already chosen for the blanket. But, I was pretty excited to see my favorite game wind up in the top five on the leaderboards. Bragging rights go out to KDowny for nominating it:

My vote goes out to Mario Kart as it is the only game I was ever able to beat my older brother at growing up.

KDowny, may your older brother always feel the shame of his defeat.

https://www.instagram.com/p/_765njCZmk/?taken-by=doctor_llama

I didn’t get into video games until my late teens, so I missed out on playing some of the older versions. Mario Kart for the Wii though, that is my JAM.

When I first met my husband at a Halloween party, I was oblivious to him coming onto me. He had identified me as a member of his nerdy species and talked to me about every fandom he could think of until one of them stuck, which was how I wound up over at his house on the pretense of playing Mario Kart. I guess it was the “Netflix and Chill” of 2o0o and late. We went out to a diner (one of the best things about dating a Jersey boy is all of the wonderful 24 hour diners that Jersey is blessed with) and then back to his place for some sweet Mario action. We turned on the game. We did not play it.

::ahem::

We made plans to play that game at least a dozen times before actually managing some game play. It’s eight years later now, we’ve been married for 4 years and will be joined by a daughter any day now. I still get all warm and fuzzy thinking about Mario Kart.

Classic Mario also made the leaderboards. Props to Bourbongirl who nominated it saying:

Every Christmas we have a Classic Mario Bros competition, and I always wipe the floor with my husband and three teen boys. It makes me very happy.

It makes us happy too, Bourbongirl!

We will not be adding a Classic Mario square to this year’s blanket in addition to Mario Kart. But only because we’ve already got one! The 2014 blanket featured Classic Mario and you can get that chart here. This year we wanted to make sure everyone gets a chance to rock their fandom, so we made the 2016 squares the same size and gauge as the 2014 squares. Feel free to mix and match. If you are competing for prizes in the Ravelry group, your 24 square blanket WILL be prize eligible using any mix of L&L charts from 2014 or 2016.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BAEH38zny6F/?taken-by=jac_attacking

Post Edited for 5 Year Anniversary

This post has been edited to add an updated version of the Mario Kart pattern to celebrate five years of geeking along. The graph is the same, but the pattern now includes more information. You can download the new Mario Kart pattern by clicking the link. Instructions for both knit and crochet are now listed in the pattern. When you’re finished making it, Instagram your squares at us @lattesandllamasyarn with the hashtag #geekalong! This now concludes the edited portion of this post.

If you’re having trouble with double-sided knitting, we have a how-to video here and a tutorial on crochet here. Want to hang out with other people making the blanket? You can find moral support in the Geek-A-Long group on Ravelry here.

~ Megan-Anne
Kevin and I still have a sort of Pavlovian response to Mario Kart. 

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If you enjoyed this post, please consider making a donation to Child’s Play Charity. Here is a direct link to our donation page benefiting the charity. Please help us raise $1,000 this year! No contribution is too small. Wanna make your donation go even further? Louet Yarn is donating 50 cents for every skien of Louet Gems Worsted purchased this year to make a Geek-A-Long blanket. You can get Gems at your Local Yarn Store or through Louet’s website. Just remember to mention the GAL at check out.