One of my favorite things about knitting is pairing colors together, so the Toddler Blanket in two colors of Red Heart’s Comfort Sport immediately caught my eye. The photo on the website is done in two different tones of blue, but I’m all over this thinking in complementary and contrasting colors.
Red Heart’s Toddler Blanket Pattern
This blanket appeals to me on so many levels. Whenever I see a baby blanket knit up in a single color it looks very bland to me. Even if there’s a bit of a stitch pattern, it seems plain. My mind works in colors and the less color there is to play around with, the more complicated the stitch pattern has to be.
I find color work very therapeutic; it’s something of a mantra to me, and for some unknown reason, I can’t fall into the same head-space when working on stitch patterns. I love color in this blanket because you could do two colors or three, four, five, you could switch out colors as you go and do a rainbow. Yes, the pattern only calls for two, but it’s incredibly easy to adjust your plan and simply start swapping colors in and out as you please. You could knit this blanket a thousand times and make it look completely different each time.
The Toddler Blanket swatch made from Lilac and Turquoise
At first glance I thought it was a slip stitch color-work pattern, but this blanket actually mimics crochet. The small dots are made from working two rows in the same color. One row is a purl row and the other is essentially a yo, k3, pass the first knit stitch over.
When I was reading the instructions I was a little bit confused. I thought it was almost a bind off, but then I realized, that’s where the shapes are made. In the photo they look like circles, but that shape is obviously perfected through blocking.
This is Soft Baby Steps yarn, but wouldn’t a blanket in these colors be amazing? It screams “cute rubber duckie” at me.
Aside from getting the stitch pattern right the only thing slightly different about this blanket is the fact that it has a crochet edge.
If crochet really isn’t a skill you possess it’s easy enough to pick up stitches along the edges, you could do a simple rib stitch or a seed stitch. Don’t pick up the whole way around, but pick up one edge, knit your chosen stitch, bind off, pick up stitches along the opposite edge and do the same. Then you can choose whichever side of the last two and pick up stitches along the blanket and the other two edges you previously knit.
Light Pink and Denim would be cute together as well. It makes me think ‘cowgirl’.
I really can’t say enough about Red Heart’s Toddler Blanket pattern; it’s definitely going to be my new go-to for baby blankets. Easy enough to knit, but has a lot of interest generated through the perfect balance of colors and interesting stitch pattern. It’s also got nice clean lines, which really appeals to my sense of aesthetics.
This is part 4 of 5 in this series.
Go back to part 3: 3 reasons to knit with baby yarn
