Do You Know Where Your Needles Are?
Sofiya Cremin
The K and P instructions stand for Knit and Purl, the two stitches used in knitting, which is why you need to know where your needles are. Unlike some past Mystery Hunt puzzles, this knitting puzzle actually depends on knowing how knitting works. Specifically:
- Knitting is boustrophedonic. That is, after reaching the end of a row, you turn around and knit the next row in the opposite direction.
- When you reach the end of the row, you also flip the work over and work from the back side.
- A purl is basically an inverted knit. In combination with the above points, this means that in the backward rows, the sense of the knits/purls will also be swapped.
- And there are also a lot of macros where segments or whole previous lines are repeated. These work exactly the way they look.
The sample puzzle helps you figure all these points out if you don't already understand them. When you solve it correctly, it spells A-OK!
Then you can solve the main puzzle, which makes a little Paint-by-Numbers puzzle:
Solve this puzzle:
The answer is spelled out in the white areas of the solved grid: OUTFIT.