Get your craft supplies ready warm up your NES—we’re having a Nintendo-inspired craft contest! Well over 6000 people have downloaded our free Mario Sweater Vest pattern, and it’s just been featured in the latest issue of Nintendo Power so we’re in the mood to celebrate. If you’ve ever made a Nintendo craft, send us a photo. If you haven’t made one yet, what are you waiting for? Get crafting, and send us a photo of the result. We’ll post it in an online gallery where our website visitors will vote for their favourite ones. We’ll send the winner a grand prize of $250! The second place will win $150 CAD, and third place wins $75 CAD. All three winners and their entries will also get featured on my blog!

How to Enter

Just make something Nintendo-inspired, and send us a photo of it using this form. Please submit only one entry per craft. If you’ve made more than one Nintendo craft, you can submit multiple entries, but you will have to fill out the form separately for each entry. And, please only send in photos of Nintendo crafts that you made yourself.

Judging

All acceptable entries will be posted in an online photo gallery, where you and our website visitors will get to rate each photo out of five stars. On June 30, 2010 the contest judges will look at the top 10 voted entries, and pick our three favourites to award prizes. The winners will be notified via e-mail by July 15th to claim their prize. Please note that you will need a PayPal account to claim the prize.

As you have probably figured out by now, I love making nerdy stuff. I also love looking at nerdy crafts that other people have made as a great source of inspiration. So with that in mind, I give you this 100% nerdy round-up of geek crafts.

Space Invaders Cutting Board

From Captain Sideburns (you gotta love the name!) comes this fantastic and well-executed Space Invaders cutting board, made of precisely-cut cubes of high quality wood, glued together with FDA-approved food safe glue. Check out his blog for the instructions.

NES Controller Coffee Table

This kicks so much butt on so many levels, I don’t even know where to begin. This coffee table made by Ultra Awesome is not only an impressively accurate representation of the classic NES controller blown up to giant proportions, but it actually functions as an NES controller! If you want to nerd up your own living room with one of these (and who could blame you) you can get started here.

Lego Halloween Costume

Check out CraftZine for the instructions to make this awesome/adorable/slightly strange Lego costume made of a box and plastic food containers. All you’ll need to do is find a kid to bully into wearing this thing…

Giant Super Mario Quilt

This one might just put my Mario Sweater Vest to shame. This is well over 6 feet of geeky goodness in the form of a crocheted quilt. Me like!

Underpants Gnome

I’m a huge fan of South Park, so I was so happy when I saw this cute crocheted Underpants Gnome. Based on the cuteness, you’d never guess that he’d want to pilfer all of your underpants. But it’s always the cute ones you have to look out for…

Cross-Stitched Super Mario Map

Another Mario-themed entry, this elaborately detailed Super Mario map made by the Cross Stitch Ninja is so impressive it almost takes my breath away. Even more impressive is that the Ninja made two others: Super Mario 3 World 1 and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening.

“Apple” Pie

I love visual puns, even more so if it’s also a dessert! Bonus points for the incredibly intricate latticework inside the apple. Find out how to make your very own here.

VHS Toaster

Finally something useful to do with those obsolete VHS players. As a bonus, now you can actually encourage your toddler to stick bread into your VCR! Learn how to make one with this tutorial from Instructables.

Where the Wild Things Are Amigurumi

I can’t get over how beautiful these crocheted characters from Where the Wild Things Are…are. Just look at how carefully the different textures of yarn were chosen and combined, and not a single detail overlooked.

jQuery Pumpkin

Finally, for you fellow coding nerds, is this pumpkin featuring a jQuery pun. See one more here, featuring yet another deliciously nerdy coding pun!

The instructions come in one size, at a finished waist circumference of 40 inches. That should comfortably fit anyone with a waist size of 36–38 inches. If you happen to have different proportions, no worries. A plain knitting chart is also included that you can use in conjunction with almost any sweater pattern of your choice. If you need a bigger size than the chart will accommodate, just repeat the sky and rocks on the sides. A great place to find knitting patterns is Knitty. They have lovely patterns for women, men, and children, and they’re all free so it’s a great place to start. If you find a pattern using a gauge of around 26-28 stitches = 4 inches, you should be able to use the KnitPicks Pallette yarn in the materials list. Otherwise, you’ll have to find yarn of a different weight to use.

Download the Pattern

Mario Sweater Vest Pattern (8494)
You’ll need Acrobat PDF Reader, which you can download here: Download Acrobat Reader

Update

We forgot to include a color key with the chart! If you’re having problems figuring out which color goes where, download this: Mario Sweatervest Color Key (152).

Over 100 comments were posted in response to the original post in just five days, so I’m keeping my end of the deal by making a pattern. I’ll try to post it within a week or so. Sign up for the newsletter in the sidebar, and I’ll let you know right away when the pattern is available.

I’m starting the pattern right away, so stay tuned!

Getting a Custom Colour of Yarn

I found the best selection of colours of yarn at KnitPicks, which has almost every colour you could imagine. Almost.

I looked everywhere, and couldn’t find the bright green that I needed for the pipe and small bush, so I ordered an extra skein of white and dyed it with chartreuse acid dye to get the colour I needed. All that to knit a pipe and a small bush! But I think the result was well worth it.

Front

Back

Making the Sweater

I just made up the armhole and neckline shaping as I went along, and held up the half-finished sweater in front of my hubby to make sure the shaping was working. I left live stitches on the shoulders on stitch holders while I finished the rest of the sweater, so that they could be grafted together at the end for a seamless finish, and then picked up stitches along the armhole and neckline edges with a circular needle to knit the ribbed trimming.

The design wraps seamlessly around the sweater from front to back. I originally knit the row of rocks (or are they bricks?) around the bottom of the sweater using a Fair Isle technique, but the whole thing ended up bunching up to about half it’s intended width. So in the end, I cut that section out, knit 16 rows of plain brown, seamlessly grafted the two sections back together again and then embroidered the pink and black lines that make up the pattern of bricks using a stitch that mimics knit stitches.

Take that, Octorok! Eat this, Skulltula!

Taking a quick nap before entering the next dungeon

For those of you who have your own little nerdling to dress up, you can download the free knitting pattern here.

I made this baby-sized Link costume as a baby shower gift for a couple of close friends. Both are huge fans of Zelda, and they are expecting their first child very soon. After posting it on Craftster I was absolutely blown away by the response it received—over 30,000 hits in just one week, and before long dozens of blogs from Geekologie.com to Kotaku.com and even GayGamer.net wrote about my nerdy little outfit! (I love the GayGamer logo, by the way! Would it be inappropriate to call it fabulous?)

You can download the pattern here: Baby Link Pattern (7404). Now you’ll be able to dress up the infant of your choice as Link! Don’t have an infant handy? Make a Baby Link Outfit anyway! Your significant other just might make a baby with you just to be able to dress him/her up as Link!

To view the PDF you’ll need Acrobat Reader. If you don’t have it, you can download it here for free: Download Acrobat Reader