Completed Pac-Man Peysa

At long last, I have finished knitting the Pac Man Peysa!
Doc modeling the Pac Man Peysa in a bookstore

I’m pretty happy with how it turned out!

As you might recall, I told Doc that I would knit a sweater for him if he designed one. While the sweaters I had been knitting for myself were more traditional-looking Icelandic sweaters (lopapeysa), Doc of course designed a Pac-Man Peysa! He used http://knittingpatterns.is/ to do it, which is a super fun tool for designing Icelandic sweaters (although it is ancient and runs on Microsoft Silverlight)

Of course, the pattern had a lot of difficulties in it, since it was designed by somebody who had never knitted before (that is to say, Doc). I didn’t think about that, but it really made a difference to how things worked out. After I complained, Doc would make modifications based on my feedback and it would be much easier to implement.

I had initially thought that it was important to be super faithful to Doc’s design; but when I would bring up a part of the pattern that was not ideal for knitting, it would turn out that he didn’t even particularly want it that way – he just designed it like that because he didn’t know it would make it more difficult. So the pattern went through many many changes, and the final pattern is something we collaborated on.

It was still difficult in many ways, like having all the different color ghosts (instead of one color of ghost which would have been much easier), but that is something we weren’t willing to compromise. That’s almost the whole point of the sweater! And I’d say it was worth it.

If you want to download the pattern we generated from knittingpattern.is, it is here:

pac-man-sweater

Note that the pattern doesn’t indicate the accurate number of stitches in the sleeve pattern, because it doesn’t show the increases. However the instructions do accurately say to increase every 6 rows. Use your judgement, and don’t do an increase in the middle of Pac-Man’s face or something, that sort of thing, and it will still work out fine.

Here’s some more photos of Doc wearing it:

Doc modeling the Pac Man Peysa

Finished Pac Man Peysa!

And here are some of the in-progress photos to reminisce over:

Iceland 2017
Me knitting the neckband of the peysa
More Pacman peysa progress
In progress shot / closeup of the sleeve
The Pac Man Peysa is getting close to done...
In progress shot from when I was still working the yoke

Author: Steen

Steen is a nerdy biologist who spends a lot of time trying to cultivate Chloroflexi, who also likes to draw comics, play video games, and climb.

12 thoughts on “Completed Pac-Man Peysa”

  1. I absolutely love this pattern. However I have a rather large family and wondered if the pattern also came in larger sizes? I live in New Zealand and my children live in London and the weather there gets really cold so this pattern would be perfect.

    Hope you have a wonderful Christmas. It is beautifully sunny and warm here in New Zealand.

    1. Hi Jenny, I’m glad you like it!

      Unfortunately, we only designed it in the one size, but we used the tool at http://knittingpatterns.is/ to design it. Here is a link to download the design file, which you can freely alter and edit using that online tool:
      https://www.dropbox.com/s/b1z9tfxh9kdnl2j/pac%20man%20sweater.prjon?dl=0

      I don’t know if it would be easier to up-size it from this file, or to just make a new file from scratch. I’ve only ever designed patterns for one size, and never tried up/down sizing a pattern before. But since I’m sharing this pattern online, maybe I should try my hand at releasing it in a few different sizes (smaller and larger). If I do end up up-sizing it, I’ll let you know!

      Lopapeysas do sound like they’d be the perfect thing for your children, they are ideal for cold and wet conditions. Good luck and merry Christmas!

  2. Hi Steen! 🙂

    I LOVE how this sweater turned out!! <3 ^_^ I'm going to try and see if I can make size modifications per your instructions in the other post. A question though… what type and size of yarn did you use?? I'm excited to try this out! ~_^

    1. Hey Katie!

      That’s super exciting, I hope the resizing works out smoothly. The yarn I used was Léttlopi, on 4.5mm needles (US size 7), where 18 sts and 24 rows ~ 10 x 10 cm.

      Feel free to let me know if you have any other questions!

    1. I just switched out for different color yarns on every ghost. It was very laborious and probably not a great idea, but it worked. So each row for the yoke had many many balls of yarn concurrently.

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