Spring+Summer Knitty is Here!

It’s Knitty time again, and it looks like the spring+summer issue is bringing us lots of great projects to queue, as usual.

My favorite may well be the colorful Easy as Pie Blanket, perfect for the little kid in your life. It’s shaped with short rows and would be a great stash buster if you didn’t mind the circles not matching.

Heading into summer there are lots of tank top patterns here. I like the super-sultry Daphne Tank, perfect knitting for your inner bombshell, and the lace-paneled Etherial Tank, which may actually be going in my queue.

There are several great shawls in this issue, too, to help you make the transition to warmer weather and protect you in the air conditioning. The Nori Shawl is a lovely lace number worked sideways form tip to tip in a sort of zig-zag lace, and it only uses one skein of sock yarn. And then there’s the fun Steps Shawl, which uses tucked pieces worked in different colors to shape the shawl into a spiral. Fun!

See anything you like? I’d love to here what’s going in your queue!

[Photo via Knitty.]

I guess I must have had this pattern on my mind, because I had chosen this log cabin blanket recipe to write about, promptly forgot about it and a couple of weeks later started knitting a log cabin blanket using all my pink yarn.

It might stay pink if it makes it to baby blanket sized, or I might add in some pastel green and blue, too, to make a bigger blanket. We’ll see. I’m also holding several strands of yarn together to make a kind of bulky yarn, which means it’s deeply satisfying how much yarn is used even as the project is still relatively small.

In Kristen Finlay’s version, DK weight yarn scraps (or fingering/sock yarn held double) are used to make a simple scrappy log cabin blanket that’s lighter weight than my version. Log cabin is a great technique for knitters of any skill level because it’s worked in garter stitch. The only not completely basic technique you need for log cabin knitting is picking up stitches.

If you’ve never worked a log cabin knitting project before, this is a good introduction, and it is really nice to use all your yarn scraps in one big project you’ll use for years to come.

If you use a lot of DK weight yarn you can keep building on it whenever you finish a project, or if you use more worsted weight you can do the same thing with it, it will just be a little bigger starting out than the pattern calls for. How big it gets is totally up to you.

I have really been enjoying working on my log cabin project, and it’s my current sitting at my desk and need a break knit (do you have one of those or is it just me?).

Ready to start your own log cabin blanket knitting project? You can grab the free pattern from Kristen Finlay on Ravelry.

Need more log cabin inspiration? Check out more log cabin knitting patterns.

[Photo: Kristen Finlay]

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