This is kind of a crossing of two things I enjoy: crochet and pixel art.
I've seen several crochet projects that use solid colored granny squares to make a pixel art blanket. They look pretty cool but also seem like a TON of work, not just creating all the damn squares but then sewing them all together. Blech.
My cousin is also into crochet and has been making blankets and asking me to help her with the designs. Usually it'll be someone requesting a logo from such and such so I'll try to find a clean, decent resolution version of the logo (vectors are ideal), shrink it down to the res I need, and pixel on top to fill it out and tweak what needs tweaking. Resizing gets you close but you need to be able to simplify colors down. No one wants to crochet anti-aliasing colors. That and any letting turns into a terrible mess and has to be redone by hand.
People apparently appreciate how nice my patterns turn out. Once my cousin finishes a blanket she shows it off on some of her online crochet groups and several people have asked about the patterns and where she gets them. So on top of my cousin paying me a couple bucks for each pattern, she has been able to resell it to others (and pass the money on back to me). I won't get rich off it but it's nice to have a little mad money.
Ok, let me show some of them. A few I didn't keep around after I made them or they were just too simple to care much about (like the US flag one I did).
John Deere
Nothing too exciting but this one was a particularly small version meant to produce a baby blanket.
Ford
Another pretty simple one. I use Aseprite as one of my pixel art programs and one of the great tools included is drawling circles and ellipses. Pain the butt to do by hand but Aseprite made it quite simple for this one. The text didn't need all that much tweaking, either.
Godsmack
Sigh...I know. It was a request from someone she knows. At first I told her I couldn't do it because the logo looked too detailed to recreate in a low resolution. I tried anyway and surprised myself. And then I tried to do the text and....oh shit, it doesn't fit. So I then had to start over, creating the text first and building the rest around it. Turned out better than I thought.
Harley Davidson
Another request. Text went surprisingly ok so I didn't have to fudge anything too much.
Hearthstone
This one isn't for my cousin, it's for me. She linked me to the technique she's been using to make her blankets, called corner-to-corner or box stitch. After making a small sample piece it seems to work up really quickly so I thought I might try my hand at making something for myself. Decided the Hearthstone card back would be a cool lap blanket. I need to get all my yarn together so I can start. Spent a lot of time tweaking this one.
Immortan Joe symbol
Something I worked up for fun. No one requested it and I don't know if I'll make anything with it but it was fun practice. Not quite done with it, I think I can tweak it a little more.
