Free Dallas Cowboys "pattern"

As you may recall, I made this potholder for my friend Jimmy.



It occurred to me that there may be other Dallas fans out there who would like to use this pattern to make their own fan swag of whatever ilk. (No judgments.) So here is the grid:



This is the pixilated image I used to make the potholder. If you would like to use this for your own Dallas Cowboys related items, please feel free!

I made this in Photoshop. I got a couple images online, one of a helmet and one of the Cowboys team name, and put them together in one image. Then I converted it to use indexed color mode, with flattened layers. (Palette: Master Perceptual; Colors: 3; Forced: None; Diffusion: 100%; Preserve Exact Colors checked.)

Then I went in and touched up various areas by hand using the brush. Then I changed the image size considerably (from about 550x550 pixels to about 165x165). Then I overlaid the grid. THEN I took a screen capture of that to give the impression of pixilation, which gives you the grid for knitting against.

This is only approximate and my actual steps were slightly different; I'm not being coy but I'm trying to simplify. In fact, the pixilation was much grainier than what I'm describing; after I knitted a swatch, I knew my potholder would only be about 45 stitches across, which was a lot less than 165 across! and I had to do some hand drawing and tweaking. Even then, my original swatch was done with size 11 needles, and I ended up using size 7's to compress the gauge, and even THEN it was way too big, but finally after I felted it down from there, it was a good potholder size with a reasonably recognizable image. There was a lot of eyeballing and seat-of-the-pantsing with this. But it was an interesting experiment.

Ravelry link