Use All Your Scraps on This Fun Blanket Knitting Pattern

I feel like the longer we are all home the more we want to use as much of the yarn we have in the house as possible. If you’ve got a bunch of scraps to burn through, might I suggest the Safe in the City Blanket by Margaret Holzmann?

This sweet design features stacks and stacks of different colored houses, forming a sort of hillside under a night sky.

It’s a perfect stash busting project because you can make each house a different color if you like, and windows of each house could use tiny bits of leftover yarn as well. Or you can use bigger quantities of the same yarn repeating as shown in the pattern.

The project is intarsia heavy and worked in strips that are sewn together, so I would definitely say it’s for intermediate knitters who are comfortable with those techniques. You can get the pattern on Ravelry for $4.99.

[Photo: Margaret Holzmann.]

The butterfly on this piece — the Owl Butterfly Playmat by Sophie’s Stitches — caught my eye before I even knew what the project was. Now that I’ve give it a closer look I’m still not 100 percent sure what it is meant to be for, but I still love it.

I think it’s maybe to give you a flat surface to roll dice or play cards on, but there are no images of the project in use so I’m just speculating on that. If you know what it is, be sure to let me know!

What it physically is is a worsted weight mat (the sample is worked in cotton) that measures 14 by 24 inches, or 35.5 by 61 cm. The impression I get from the pattern notes and the photos is that you knit the rectangle plain and the butterfly is stitched on after using duplicate stitch, which is provided as a chart.

Of course you could choose to knit some of the colorwork as you go, either using stranded knitting or intarsia techniques, or maybe some of both. It just looks like a lot of duplicate stitch (and it is!) so knowing me if I were making this project I’d probably try to knit some of it instead of stitching it all.

The pattern also suggests that you can knit a second plain mat to sew on the back and cover up all the yarn ends, as well as making the mat thicker and a little more stable. There’s also a photo that shows fabric sewn to the back, which is also a good option if you have some fabric that has a bit of grip.

I like the graphic on this one enough I might just make it as a table pad for our entry way table. You can always make the mat part a different dimension, just make sure you’re centering the image if you do.

You can find this pattern on Ravelry.

[Photo: Sophie’s Stitches]

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