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.

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Stitch dictionaries are a fun way to learn new-to-you knitting stitch patterns or to take a deep dive into a particular technique. Debbie Tomkies offers 100 cable stitch designs and thoughts on how to incorporate them into projects in her Cable Knitting Stitch Dictionary.

Each stitch pattern is shown in a large swatch photo and with written and charted instructions. Any special stitches are included on the page. The stitches are rated on a difficulty scale of 1 to 3, and the pattern notes also indicate how many extra stitches you should add to a project if you’re going to work this cable (since cables pull the fabric closer together you need to compensate for that) as well as how many stitches and rows are in the repeat if you want to design a project yourself.

The cables are arranged into sections: classic cables, combinations, all-over panels, creative cables, motifs and panels and cabled edges and borders.

It’s fun to flip through the designs to think about projects you can add a single cable or two to or make with an allover cabled design. Or you could make swatches of different cables and sew them together into a pillow cover or a throw.

At the back of the book there’s a section on general cable knitting techniques, reading charts, working swatches and avoiding errors (though it mentions working the wrong number of rows between cable turns, it doesn’t share how to count rows between cables to avoid this mistake).

It also talks about how to design your own cables, combine cables in a project, choose the right yarn and needles and determine how many more stitches you need to cast on when working cables instead of stockinette stitch. There’s also a glossary of symbols and abbreviations you may find in cable knitting and other patterns.

The book provides a good overview of things you can do with cables, as well as some fun things you might not have tried like infinity cables and horizontal cables. It’s a great book for a designer who likes to work with cables or a knitter who wants to play with different stitches in their projects.

About the book: 176 pages, paperback, 100 stitch patterns. Published 2024 by David & Charles. Suggested retail price $26.99.

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