This woolen Pac-Man sweater, an Icelandic peysa, popped up in my Facebook feed on Wednesday and it made me squee with delight. It's the handiwork of my friend Christine Clarke.

She told me that her husband, Doctor Popular, designed the sweater in knittingpatterns.is and, after some tweaking, she knit it up for him.

"I told him that if he designed a sweater, I'd knit it for him. But since he never knitted before, it was really difficult to implement his original design, so I ended up making a lot of modifications that didn't really affect the look but made a huge difference in how easy it was to knit."

And knit it, she did...

Christine told me she has been working on the sweater on and off for months, "I started it early February of this year, and of course I only finished it now."

If you'd like to knit one for yourself (and you're roughly the same size as Doc Pop), they've been kind enough to share the pdf pattern with us. Download it here. Christine says spent about $80 on yarn "because I had to get all the different colors, so even for a small accent (like the white), I bought a whole ball of it, so I'll have to think of a different project for all the leftovers."

Can't wait to see what's next!

photos by Christine Clarke and Doc Pop Read the rest

Look at 'im in 'is widdle swedder. Just look at 'im.

Seriously, though, apparently penguins caught up in oil spills sometimes need sweaters to keep them from preening their feathers and ingesting toxic oil. The Skeinz yarn store is looking for people to knit penguin sweaters. They even provide instructions on how to do it.

Also, come on. Penguin sweaters.

Thanks, Noah Hall! Read the rest