August 24th, 2010 | 
Author: I just got an email from fabric.com saying that they are offering an additional 15% off any purchase site-wide of $40 or more. The sale is valid Aug 24 through Aug 30. Plus you still get free shipping on orders of $35 or more. Just use offer code “DOD810”. Now would be a great time to buy ahead for your holiday gift making. Use the link at the beginning of this article.
Christmas (or any other winter holiday/occasion) is a great opportunity to try a new afghan knitting pattern. Here are links to some pretty afghan patterns I found on the Lion Brand website. You might want to try one or more of these for a special holiday gift:
Garter Stitch Baby Throw – This is trickier than it sounds because it’s worked on the diagonal. If you managed to do either the Cromwell Court Afghan or the Spumoni Crib Afghan, you won’t have any problems.
Car Blanket – This pattern should work up fast since it’s made with Thick & Quick yarn on size 13 needles. Plus it introduces how to make a really easy buttonhole (for the straps). Finished size is 41 x 42 inches.
Layfayette Square Throw – This lap blanket is worked with two strands of yarn at a time on size 11 needles. The suggested color changes are beautiful. With a seed stitch border and stockinette in the middle, you’ll be able to knit pretty much on autopilot except for remembering to change colors.
Cozy Nook Throw – This pattern is just a hair more challenging because it’s done in the woven stitch. Lion Brands rates it Easy+. But they give you complete instructions on how to do it. This pattern be perfect to do up in college colors for use as a stadium blanket.
Whichever afghan knitting pattern you choose, be sure to check out the prices at fabric.com before you order elsewhere.
What are you planning to make for Christmas (or other holiday or occasion)? Please share your ideas and pattern links by leaving a comment below.
Worried about taking the needles for your easy knitting patterns through airport security? The official rules for what you can and can’t take on an airplane can be found in an informative pdf document called Rules and Regulations from the Transportation Safety Administration.
Basically, you may take knitting and crochet needles regardless of the material they are made from (metal, plastic, or wood). Also, you may take either plastic or metal scissors as long as they have blunt tips.
The pdf document cited above does not address small needles at all. However, an article entitled Transporting Knitting Needles & Needlepoint on the TSA website specifies
Items needed to pursue a Needlepoint project are permitted in your carry-on baggage or checked baggage with the exception of circular thread cutters or any cutter with a blade contained inside which cannot go through the checkpoint and must go in your checked baggage.
So based on this article, it appears that you could carry on a small sewing or yarn needle, but you need to leave your box cutter and Olfa blades in your checked bag.
In a tip on the Lion Brand website, alert reader Cynthia G. suggests that you carry a printed copy of the TSA rules referenced above when traveling by air. Apparently, not all TSA employees are aware that knitting needles are allowable items.
Another place where having a copy of these rules might come in handy is at a courthouse. (In fact, knowing about this may have saved me some money when I went on jury duty a while back. See an Ezine article I wrote called Easy Knitting Patterns Work Best on These Needles.)
And to be really safe, you might want to carry along a priority mail flat rate envelope with correct postage to either the airport or the courthouse, just in case the guard still won’t let you in with your valuable equipment. Just pop the offensive item in the envelope and mail it back home. (Or if you’re going on a long vacation, address it to your destination.) It will save you from having to go back out to your car when you’re probably running late anyhow.
On a slightly related topic, I discovered a cute children’s pattern for easy-to-spot luggage tags on the Lion Brand website here.
What has been your experience in flying with needles? Leave a comment below and share your story.
Posted in Easy Knitting Patterns, Knitting Tips | 
Tags: airport security, courthouse security, easy knitting pattern, knitting needles, scissors | 
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After figuring out the number of rows and color scheme for my Spumoni Crib Afghan pattern, the only step left is to figure out how much yarn to buy.
There is no magic math, unfortunately, to calculate how many yards of yarn it will take to make a given square of knitted material in a given baby knitting pattern. However, there are some charts available that give some approximate amounts. For a chart from Lion Brand, click here.
The Lion Brand chart gave me a place to start. Read the rest of this entry »
In my last entry, I described figuring out the number of stitches I need per row in my Spumoni Crib Afghan pattern. The next step in developing this baby knitting pattern is to figure out how many rows to work, plus to pick the color scheme and stripe design. Recall that the wave pattern I am using is a repeated set of four rows. The first thing I need to calculate is the size of one four-row repeat.
The gauge for worsted yarn says 22 rows = 4 inches. I want to know how many inches for just 4 rows: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Easy Knitting Patterns, Knitting Tips |
Tags: afghan, baby blanket, Baby Knitting Pattern, crib afghan, spumoni crib afghan |
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In my last post, I discussed choosing yarn and finished size when cutting down a full-size afghan pattern to a smaller baby knitting pattern. The next thing to do in cutting down the pattern is to figure out how many stitches will be in each row.
First, I need the gauges for both old and new yarns. In the case of the Spumoni Crib Afghan, the original pattern (Cromwell Court Afghan) used bulky yarn and the new pattern will use worsted yarn.
The gauge on the (original) bulky yarn package said 9 st = 4 in.
The gauge on the (new) worsted yarn package said 16 st = 4 in.
The original pattern was 114 st wide.
So if all I was doing was reworking the original pattern in a different yarn, but not changing the finished size, the new number of stitches would be calculated as follows: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Easy Knitting Patterns, Knitting Tips |
Tags: afghan, baby blanket, Baby Knitting Pattern, crib afghan, spumoni crib afghan |
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Like most knitters, when I work a baby knitting pattern I like to use a lighter weight yarn. The popular choices are #2 (traditional “baby” weight), #3 (sport) or #4 (worsted). Since I’m all about getting things done fairly quickly, I went with #4 for my Spumoni Crib Afghan. I chose Vanna’s Choice Baby Yarn because I liked using it for her Saw Tooth Edge Afghan I reviewed earlier, and I like the colors she offers.
Next I considered the finished size. Vanna’s Saw Tooth Edge Afghan measures 27 x 32 inches. The recommendations from Allison Isaacs in How to Make a Baby Blanket Part 1 are that baby blankets should measure 24 x 36 inches. The super-easy baby knitting pattern from How to Make a Baby Blanket Part 2 is 32 inches wide. After reviewing these three options, I decided to go with the larger dimension (32 inches wide). I figured this would be more of a crib or nap blanket and would maybe continue to be used while the child was in preschool. To keep a nice proportion, I figured the length should be about 48 inches (1.5 times the width).
Here’s a picture of the blanket half done. You can see the stitch markers on the needles. In case you are wondering, Spumoni is a flavor of ice cream. It has layers of chocolate, pistachio, and some variety of pink, such as strawberry or cherry. I picked the colors of yarn after looking at websites for crib linens. Then I noticed how similar the combination looks to the ice cream. Hence the name.
Posted in Easy Knitting Patterns, Knitting Tips |
Tags: afghan, baby blanket, Baby Knitting Pattern, crib afghan, spumoni crib afghan |
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After making the Cromwell Court Afghan, I decided to try to cut it down to make a baby knitting pattern. I wanted it to be a bit bigger than a regular baby blanket so it could be used on a crib or toddler bed, or become a preschool nap blanket. As far as easy knitting patterns go, I would rate this as an Easy+ (on the difficult end of easy) because of the increases and decreases in every fourth row, plus frequent (optional) color changes.
The final Spumoni Crib Afghan measures about 34” wide by 45” long. Here is the basic pattern, minus the color changes. To download a pdf file of the entire Spumoni Crib Afghan pattern for free, click here.
fabric.com Deal of the Day
Most of the knitting I do is making gifts for others. And most of those gifts are scarves or afghans because they fit with my philosophy of working easy knitting patterns that I can take with me, that don’t require my total focus, and that I’m likely to actually finish. I also tend to buy nice but inexpensive yarn, in keeping with my frugal living philosophy. My usual place to buy yarn is at my local Michaels store. I am signed up for their weekly emails and I try to plan my purchases to make best use of their sales and coupons. (Sign up here.) But not everyone has access to a local store, and sometimes the store doesn’t carry or has run out of a color I want. So I decided to look at the online options. As I quickly discovered, buying just one or two skeins of yarn online is not a good idea because of the shipping costs. By the time you add shipping, the cost of your one skein could easily be doubled or tripled, especially for an inexpensive yarn. That having been said, buying yarn can be a good deal if you need a lot of it. For example, I took a look around to see where the best deal was to buy yarn for the Cromwell Court afghan I reviewed in my last blog entry (Easy Knitting Pattern Review–Cromwell Court Afghan). That pattern takes eight skeins of Lion Brand Wool-ease Thick & Quick yarn which normally retails for $6.99 to $7.99 per skein. I discovered that fabric.com has the lowest price on shipping of any of the yarn websites I’ve looked at
Posted in Easy Knitting Patterns, Knitting Tips |
Tags: amazon, easy knitting pattern, Easy Knitting Patterns, fabric.com, frugal living |
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Most of th
e easy knitting patterns I either present or review on this site are for smaller quick-to-finish items such as scarves and baby blankets. (I try to practice UFO avoidance, as in “un-finished objects.”) But the topic of today’s entry is a grown-up-size afghan that measures about 46 x 54 in. This easy knitting pattern, called “Cromwell Court,” is available for free on the Lion Brand Yarn website here.
Many of those who submitted reviews on the Lion Brand website felt this pattern should be rated Easy+, even though the stated skill level is intermediate. You do need to know how to increase and decrease. In case you haven’t learned that yet, the pattern’s webpage has links to directions within the Abbreviations/References table near the bottom of the page. These directions are very nice, with both drawn diagrams and video to show you how to do it.
This pattern makes up fairly quickly (for an afghan) Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Easy Knitting Patterns, Pattern Reviews |
Tags: afghan, easy knitting pattern, Easy Knitting Patterns, pattern review |
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My favorite baby knitting pattern is from Vanna White’s book entitled Vanna’s Choice Heartfelt Gifts to Knit and Crochet. She calls it Saw Tooth Edge Afghan (page 22). It’s definitel
y an easy knitting pattern because it’s almost all knitting. The hardest part of the body is remembering to change colors every two rows. The only thing you need to know besides the knit stitch is how to knit-two-together for the little Prairie Point-like triangles all around the edge. These Prairie Points take a long time to make, but they are what takes this quilt from boring to super-special.
Vanna’s original design calls for a boyish color scheme of Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Easy Knitting Patterns, Pattern Reviews |
Tags: baby afghan, Baby Knitting Pattern, Easy Knitting Patterns, vanna white |
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