Book Review: Knit Color Block Blankets

It’s common to find baby blankets knit in a solid color, or sometimes using a variety of pastels or hues of blue, pink, green or yellow. But it’s not as common to find patterns for bold, bright, colorful baby blankets.

Knit Color Block Blankets by Kristi Simpson has patterns for nine easy baby blankets that bring the color.

There are colorful chevrons, a diamond blanket with striped edges, a stitch sampler with blocks of different patterns and colors, a blanket with stripes and eyelets, another with strips of different colors and textures, a couple that combine stripes and blocks and one worked with two-color blocks.

Part of the fun of these designs is that they are modular (worked in pieces that are sewn together later) so they’re great travel projects. And of course you can use more or fewer colors than the patterns call for by altering when you change colors.

This book is a lot of fun and it’s nice to see projects meant for babies that mostly aren’t traditional baby colors. Though if you’re into those colors you can absolutely make these projects in those colors, too!

About the book: 32 pages, paperback, nine patterns. Published by Leisure Arts, 2018. Suggested retail $11.99.

Fall will be here before we know it, and that means there are holidays coming right behind where we might be entertaining at home. It’s always fun to have a hand knit touch in your home for other people to see, and if you’re going to be in the kitchen all day you might as well have some nice knit dish cloths to use.

I love this little plaid hand towel from Darling Jadore. Use a little bit of leftover cotton yarn from another project for the plaid portion. It looks like the horizontal stripes are worked as you knit and the vertical stripes are done with duplicate stitch, making this a quick and easy project even newer knitters can make.

Combine garter stitch and an easy eyelet pattern worked sideways to make the Annette Dish Towel from Cluck Cluck Boots, which is meant to be reminiscent of flour sack towels. It calls for DK weight yarn and you can work it in one color or two (or even three!).

Add a little more texture with this set of kitchen towels from Whileberry Creative. They’re mostly worked in garter stitch with borders in easy knit/purl patterns, and you can work them in sport or worsted weight yarn.

Two of Wands Shop has another cute allover knit and purl pattern they call the Seersucker Textured Tea Towel. It’s an easy repeating pattern worked in worsted weight yarn, and there’s a chart in the pattern you can use, but don’t have to, if you want to practice knitting from a chart.

The Classic Cloth dish towel from Handmade Home by Connie is another one that can use a little leftover yarn in a contrasting color, or you could color block it our use stripes throughout the pattern. This one uses worsted weight yarn and another easy repeating knit purl stitch pattern.

If you like to hang your towel on the oven handle or elsewhere but it’s always falling off, try the Stay Put kitchen towel from Fancy Step Knits. This project is worked in garter stitch and includes a hole partway through so you can pull the towel through itself over a rod or handle. Stripes are optional but a nice addition.

Have you read?