Properly oriented Pokéball (white side down)

Ben has a friend/co-worker that is majorly into Pokémon.  He also commented that I should make him a pokémon laptop case.  While I could have gone with something simple like a three color pokéball design, naturally I didn’t go with JUST a pokéball design.

So I employed the finest in friend espionage to uncover which was his favorite Pokémonster.

Naturally he didn’t like something simple likeJigglypuff or everyone’s meme favorite Mudkip; his favorite was Rapidash, a flaming unicorn type.

Game Sprite of Rapidash

On the plus side game characters are all pixel based sprites, which makes pixelating an image into a stitch chart relatively easy.  1 pixel = 1 stitch.  So finding a sprite image of Rapidash wasn’t too difficult.

However, game design and development has come a long way in building up from things like Space invaders of 11 pixels and one color creatures to the mighty Rapidash with his 80 by 80 pixels sprite with multiple colors even for shading.

So I started knitting, but when I finally got the completed Rapidash panel side done, it was clear that this was not going to be small enough to be a laptop case.  And so a messenger bag design was born.  On the back side, with the layered fleece behind it being the laptop zipper pocket was the Rapidash side of the bag.

Rapidash sprite in knit

I used some bouclé yarn in autumn colors for my fire details, and mixed a strand of light colored needlepoint yarn with my darker beige in places to make an in-between shading spaces.   My first attempt was to knit with all these colors going all the time but it was rather chaotic, so I stuck with doing a stitch over my red and white stitches in the end.

The other side was a rather simple Pokéball design with a giant silver painted button for a clasp.

Pokébag with button clasp

Inside, the bag is double fleece lined (red on top of white) which enabled the feature of a zippered laptop sleeve on one side and a double pocket for Kindle and 3DS on the button side of the bag.