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.

Next Pattern:

If you’re looking for a fun project to play with brioche knitting, check out the My Buddy knitting pattern/recipe from Casuarinagirl on Ravelry.

This project doesn’t include a brioche tutorial, so it’s good to know the basics, including how to increase and decrease, but you can always practice on a swatch before you start the project if you want.

The design is meant to be flexible for the yarn you have and what size and shape of project you want to make, from a skinny neck scarf to a asymmetrical triangle or a more classic triangular shape.

The shape you end up with will depend on how often you increase (and then decrease on the other side). The pattern mentions increasing every fourth, fifth or six row (and the one shown increases and decreases every sixth row) but you can do it even more or less often depending on the shape you’re looking for an how much yarn you want to use.

You can work to whatever depth you would like, or use almost half of the yarn you have set aside for the project and begin decreasing.

When it comes to yarn, she used three strands of yarn held together to make a super fluffy shawl, but you can work it with whatever yarn and needles you like to make a wrap that’s all your own.

If you are new to brioche (or to increasing and decreasing in brioche) it might be a good idea to make a little scarf or head wrap first before diving in to the bigger pattern, just so you’re more comfortable with the technique. Or just give it a go; nothing about brioche knitting is that difficult. (But you might want to use a lifeline because I find brioche hard to rip out or fix mistakes in properly.)

You can grab the free pattern for the Buddy Wrap on Ravelry.

[Photo: Casuarinagirl]

Next Pattern:

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