Well, it is done! I present to you, the Mario Raccoon Blanket.
This was a huge and challenging project. The design phase continued throughout the project, because logistic issues kept popping up. Color decisions had to be made, because the SNES pallet was sorely lacking. Minor mistakes were made, but that's the nature of the beast with handmade crafts.
The biggest issue was dealing with the discrepancy between the length and width of a row. Crochet work never turns out square. With small projects, it is negligible. With solid colors, it is moot. With something this big and with this big of a hook, it became apparent in the checkerboard it was going to be a major problem. We compensated in the checkerboard to keep from throwing away a ton of hours of work, and then had to completely rethink the rest of the blanket. We experimented with different methods for a while, when I finally came to the idea of adding an additional row per actual game pixel. This added a significant amount of work, but worked out perfectly for the center portion. Otherwise, the blanket would have been much shorter, and mario would have looked like some Goomba's got ironic revenge.
The curtains were a pain. We had to toss out the entire first row of curtains because they looked horrid with the lighter colored shading. The solid color turned out much, much better.
As you can see in the pictures, the blanket is reversible. Overall size is 42" wide and 90" long.