How to knit

One stitch to the beat. The strip under the sweater shows what the next nine stitches have to be — a V is a knit, a bump is a pearl, a leaning V is a decrease — and you play them in time with the music.

The sweater is worked flat and seamed, not in the round, so you turn the work at the end of every row. That is the entire game. Knitting and pearling are the same motion seen from opposite sides of the fabric: a stitch that shows as a knit on the right side is made by pearling when the wrong side is facing you. The chart never changes. What your hands have to do inverts every single row. Everybody can do row one.

What you are making

A raglan pullover, in the order a real one gets knitted:

• The hem — K1, P2 rib. The waltz is in 3/4 because K1 P2 is a three-count, so one bar of music is exactly one pattern repeat.
• The body — stockinette to the underarm. The music switches to a polka in 4/4, and for about two rows that is genuinely disorienting.
• The sleeves — both at once on one needle, cuff rib first. Two sleeves knit separately are never the same length.
• The yoke — everything joined, four stitches off every row. The decreases lean: ssk at the left raglan, k2tog at the right, drawn the way they actually sit in the fabric.
• The neckband — K1, P1 rib, and bind off.

Stitch cells are six pixels wide and five tall because knitted fabric has more rows to the inch than stitches to the inch. You are graded at the end on gauge, which is how a knitter is really judged. Flaws tighten the fabric off the 20 stitches to 4 inches the pattern asks for, and the advice you get back is the advice you would really get.

Things that will go wrong

• A stitch drops. It flashes on the sweater. Hit D or click it before it runs, or it ladders all the way down the column and does not come out.
• The cat. Sits on the pattern. You knit from memory until it leaves.
• Tension. Every flaw spends it and every clean stitch buys a little back. Run out and you lose a ball of yarn. Three balls and the whole thing gets frogged — rip it, rip it.

The soundtrack

Eight chiptunes, written as actual MIDI and played in the browser through a small NES-shaped synth — two pulse channels, a triangle bass, and noise for the drums. The beat you knit to is the soundtrack's own clock, so a stitch cannot drift off the beat it was meant to land on. Both the playback and the files below come from one score, so they are the same music:

• Full soundtrack .mid
• Cast On
• Waltz of the Ribbing
• Stockinette Polka
• Double Point Jig
• Raglan Reel
• Ribbing Reprise
• Bound Off
• Frogged

On the spelling

It is purl. It has always been purl. The set says PEARL, so the game says PEARL, and she is not taking questions.