Usually when people love a video game, they just play it all the time. But then there’s Kjetil Nordin, who instead knitted a giant blanket picturing the game Super Mario 3. The blanket, which is 7 feet by nearly 6 feet long, took him 800 hours to crochet spread out over 6 years!
Lace up: If the scoreboard has white, black, blue, yellow and red, how many colors of yarn does it use?
Jog: If the water around the castle is 11 stitches wide, what numbers would you say to count them?
Sprint: If the last 3 stitches out of 11 are dark blue, what number is the 1st dark blue stitch?
Hurdle: The castle looks about 20 stitches wide by 20 stitches tall. How many stitches does that little castle have?
High Jump: If Kjetil had crocheted a whole 10 hours a day every day, in about how many weeks could he have finished?
Pole Vault: If there are 50 stitches per 1 foot length of blanket (and 50 rows per foot as well), and the whole piece is 7 feet long by 6 feet wide, how many stitches does this crazy blanket have? How would you try to multiply that out?
Answers:
Lace up: 5 colors of yarn.
Jog: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11.
Sprint: 9. Remember, if 3 are dark blue, then there are 11-3 or 8 stitches that are NOT dark blue, so it can’t be 8 (this is the “fencepost problem”). Count down from 11 to prove it!
Hurdle: About 400 stitches.
High Jump: Just over 11 weeks. He would have taken 80 days, and 77 days fill 11 weeks.
Pole Vault: 105,000 stitches. There are 2,500 in each square foot (50 rows with 50 stitches in each), which means every 4 square feet have 10,000 stitches. There are 42 square feet in total (7 x 6). So the 40 square feet have 100,000 stitches, and the last 2 square feet add another 2,500+2,500, or 5,000.
