Happy Labor Day from Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde! This week the Geek-A-Long is moving right along with the second part of the the body. Clue 6 is more relaxed than clue 5 was (when you had to cast on all the body stitches!), and for those of you that have been working hard to keep up this should be a little bit of a break.

Clue 1, Clue 2, Clue 3, Clue 4 made up the sleeves. Clue 5 cast on the body and got you started with a Triforce – a particularly beautiful chart, if you’ll allow me to toot my own horn a little. This week we are leaning into the whimsy with a Pac-Man inspired motif.

Eight Bit: Clue Six

When you add this pattern to your Ravelry library, you will have immediate access to 1) the project sheet, which includes the usual yarn/gauge/needle information for the sweater, as well as the instructions for a gauge swatch and 2) clues one-six. The remaining six clues will be released via pattern updates. Once the project is added to your library, the clues will automatically be added to your library when they release.

Add the MKAL to your Ravelry library by following this link.

Since releasing the clue yesterday I got a few DMs and one question on the Geek-A-Long Sweater Ravelry Support thread about the Pac-Man hat featured in my progress photo. When I knit the sample I tried to take fun, themed photos as I went along and I think the pac-man and Zelda pics turned out especially nice. The hat isn’t a planned upcomming pattern, it’s actually super old. My 2nd or 3rd colorwork pattern ever. Back before the Geek-A-Long, and before I really even had the idea that I wanted to be a *designer*, I was paying for textbooks by selling finished pieces on Etsy and at local craft shows. The items sold were almost entirely my and Jac’s own designs, we just didn’t really have the where-with-all or knowledge needed to write up those patterns and sell them in that format.

Objectively, an enormous amount of what makes a knitwear designer is the ability to write a pattern that other people can successfully follow. The design ideas are almost secondary. 100% of the time, Jac and I have more ideas than we can actually execute. But learning how to actually write up a pattern? That took years. I feel like I maybe did write it up at some point years ago, but I can’t find any record of it. Honestly, I’ve written and discarded so many potential pattern drafts that I’ve lost track of the ones I didn’t publish. All of this is to say that that pattern doesn’t really exist in a meaningful way, but I do actually still have the hat and since it seems like folks are interested in it, I’ll try to backwards engineer it and put it out later this year.

~Megan-Anne

PS: My thumb has healed enough that I can knit again! It’s a Labor Day miracle! I’m not back to full speed, but some stitches are better than none.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider making a donation to Child’s Play Charity. Here is a direct link to our official 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? Lattes & Llamas will donate $1 for every skein of Geek-A-Long Yarn purchased. Ask your local yarn store to carry GAL Yarn or get it through our website.