Crochet Mario Blanket Part 3- Yoshi

If you have ever attempted to crochet a cartoon with any stich other than Tunisian Simple Stitch (TSS), then you know just how annoying it can be to change colors!!

After much debate, I decided to continue my Mario Blanket in TSS.  I haven't decided if I'm going to use all of the characters I have already made even though they're in different stitches or if I'm going to scrap the 2 mushrooms and piranha plant and redo them in TSS.... we'll see!!  Maybe I can just use the mushrooms and piranha for some pillows instead?  I dunno... i gotta sleep on it..

Anywho, I finished Yoshi!!  I was super motivated so it only took me like 3 nights to do it, 2.5 hours at a time so around 7.5 hours GEEZ!!  I was also watching TV aaaannnnd I must have checked the stitch chart like a million times before each row just to make sure I didn't fudge anything up.

What do you think?! I was so excited to finish! But now that I've stared at it for a while, there are definitely some things I would change if I had to do it again.  For all of the Mario projects, I took a really small pixelated picture and made a small stitch chart on graph paper (each box = 1 stitch)  Then to make it bigger, I just made 1 box = 4 boxes (2x2) and that kept it proportional and made the picture bigger.  BUT the downfall is that it looks terribly pixelated when you blow it up like that!! I should have definitely "smoothed" the edges out a bit instead of doing the black outline so abruptly.  It does look pretty good from far away though and I think  it definitely preserves the true age of the mario nintendo game!  Remember back in the day when the characters were actually this pixelated??

Here's a close-up:

And an even closer close-up: (Please ignore my shoe holding it flat in the top left corner :-)

I used Vanna's Choice yarn for all the colors except the outside gray.  For the gray, I used Caron Simply Soft just because I had like 5 skeins to burn through!  Even though the Vanna's Choice and the Caron are both classified as Worsted weight, they're not exactly the same weight.  Vanna's Choice is definitely a bit fluffier and so the stitches that make up Yoshi came out a little bigger than the gray ones.  The only thing this really affects is that it makes my work curl up a bit more than TSS normally does but that's nothing a good blocking won't fix!! Before I put everything together, I will be sure to block the crap out of it!

Sometime in the next week, I'm going to put up a new little tab on my home page with all the posts for this blanket and stitch charts so that you can make it too if you want!  I would love L.O.V.E to see fellow yoshis and mushrooms that are roaming cyberspace out there!!

Next on my list is Bob-Omb and the Goombas!!

Check out Mario Blanket Part 1- Mushrooms

Check out Mario Blanket Part 2- Piranha Plant

Edit:
I FINALLY finished the stitch chart for Yoshi!  Enjoy and please post whatever you make on here, I would love to see :-)
In my project above, I made each sqaure in the stitch in the chart below actually equal to 4 stitches (2 stitches tall by 2 stitches wide).  This just made the yoshi bigger in size but still proportional.  Beware though that by doing this, I simply made each "pixel" larger which is why my yoshi looks so pixelated.  You should "smooth out" some of the edges once you make your chart larger which is what i should have done... oh well.  This is why this will most likely end up as a pillow and not as part of my final blanket.  Happy stitching!

Yoshi Pixel Picture
Colors:
- red
-light green
- dark green
- white (the x is supposed to be a white stitch)
- black
- background color (empty square, I used grey for my yoshi)