This Week’s New Design: Simple Baby Blanket
*and* I’ve refreshed two existing designs:
The Design: Simple Superchunky Cushion
The Design: Chusi Cushion Blanket
The design this week is for a Simple Baby Blanket, but if there isn’t a baby on the horizon in your life I have two alternative patterns for you – the Chusi Cushion Blanket and the Simple Superchunky Cushion which I have refreshed with new yarn and new ideas!
These designs show you how simple it is to take one simple garter stitch square and make it work for your life, because whoever you are, wherever you are in your life, whatever you are doing, a simple garter stitch square can become whatever you want it to be!
All theses hand knits started with a 28 stitch garter stitch square!
Knitting a garter square is the perfect moment of calm, whether you’re busy at work, running your household, looking after children, looking after parents, looking after a significant other, or the most difficult one looking after yourself!
If you are an experienced knitter or a beginner, I would love to share the joy of a garter stitch square with you!
I like to have my go to knitting, the knitting that I don’t have to think about, what I like to call my refresher knitting. I loving designing, I love trying out new stitches, I love simple cables, or simple textured stitches. I love designs that mix and match these things. And I love sharing that with knitters. I make sure my patterns are easy to follow and this can involve trying out lots of different stitch patterns to make sure they flow easily on the needles and knitters get used to the repeats as soon as they can.
All these stitches are mood stitches and between tricky new designs, or stitches that I play around with and need me to use my brain a little are fun, the stitch I go to refresh my mind is the garter stitch. And I hope this is the same with you, that this stitch brings you joy too.
The beauty of knitting in natural fibres is that different yarns drape in different ways or if you knit in different weights of yarn (like aran or dk) you get different sized finished items. Natural fibres have their own characteristics.
In the next image I thought I’d show you how this works. Here I have the Simple Baby Blanket and the Chusi Blanket. Both use the same amount of stitches in their squares and in this image both are 4 squares wide and 5 square high. One is knitted in dk weight yarn and the other in aran weight yarn, and because of this one is bigger than the other as well as the different natural fibres giving a different look and texture.
And I know lots of you reading this know this too. And lots of you will have tried different things I haven’t even thought of yet. And this is why I love knitting – there is *always* something new to learn. It doesn’t matter how long you have been knitting, there is always a new thing to find, or a new technique. I really enjoy casting on with the thumb method. Yet, I know there are loads of different casting on techniques out there to learn and maybe one day I’ll replace my technique with another one I haven’t come across yet, but for now I am loving this technique.
I love seeing what knitters produce for this reason, because it is *always* unique and amazing!
To me this is all exciting, but I know for a beginner or for someone coming back into knitting this can all seem a little overwhelming. However, all anyone needs to do to start is take the first step to start. Everything is simple once you’ve learnt it and until that point it can seem really complicated. So while I go back to garter stitch as my simple stitch I also recommend it to beginners as the first stitch (and the only other one to learn in knitting is purl so you’ll halfway there!) to just practise with. There is no quick way to become “good” at knitting, it is just to knit….and knit….and knit. Like driving a car, the only way to become a better driver is to drive.
In the next three blogs I’ve introduced the designs individually, hopefully one of these designs will be your favourite refresher or beginners project!
