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Book Review: Knit Color Block Blankets

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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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A Few of My Favorite Things for Knitters

It’s that time of year when you might want to shop for something special for a knitter (or crocheter!) in your life, or when you might want to start dropping hints for someone who might want to buy something for you this holiday season.

Either way, I’ve got just the thing on my list of gift ideas for knitters and crocheters. The full list is over on my blog Our Daily Craft, but I wanted to share a few of the highlights here to get a conversation going about great gifts for knitters.

This year I really want to get some knitter’s barber cord. There are lots of knockoffs of this product out there, but as far as I can tell Handsome Fibers on Etsy was the first to sell it. It’s a flexible cord that you can slip over your needle points (up to size 9 US/5.5mm) so that you can slip on a top-down sweater or a sleeve without having to slip all the stitches onto a piece of yarn, then back onto the needle. I feel like this would save me a ton of time, and they’re just fun besides.

I love a good knitting toolkit that can hold a bunch of tools in one place for your travel knitting kit (or to keep near wherever you knit most often). I’ve got my eye on a Akerworks knitting and crochet kit, which includes a needle gauge, swatch gauge, tiny scissors, a tape measure, stitch markers and darning needles.

And this is one I already have, but I was recently reminded how much I love my set of Fix-A-Stitch double-ended crochet hooks. These short hooks are perfect for picking up dropped stitches, and because they have hooks on both ends you can move the tool around instead of having to flip the fabric when you’re fixing a dropped stitch in garter stitch. It’s honestly the coolest thing and they’re great for fixing stitches in any other kind of fabric, too.

So, you tell me, what did I miss? Do you have a favorite knitting tool or accessory that you think every knitter should have? Tell me about it!

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