Lucky Seven Snowflake Blanket

Lucky Seven Snowflake Blanket by Ann Franklin

What is Being Made

The Lucky Seven Snowflake Blanket is a knitted heirloom blanket designed as an ideal gift for a new baby. This blanket is constructed as a single knitted piece featuring decorative stripes accented with snowflake motifs and a contrasting garter stitch border worked simultaneously throughout the project.

Knitting Techniques Used

This intermediate-level blanket employs multiple advanced knitting techniques to create its distinctive design:

• Intarsia Method: Used for single-colour stripes where separate balls of yarn are maintained for the garter stitch border and the stripe's main colour, allowing clean colour transitions without stranding.
• Fair Isle Method: Applied to multi-coloured stripes where two colours are worked across the entire row simultaneously. The unused yarn is stranded as floats across the back of the piece, creating a reversible texture.
• Garter Stitch Border: A contrast border knitted in garter stitch (every row knit) is worked at the same time as the main blanket body, creating a defined frame for the striped design.

Stitches and Stitch Patterns

The blanket showcases a variety of stitching techniques:

• Garter Stitch: Forms the border and provides textural definition throughout the design.
• Knit and Purl Stitches: Combined to create snowflake motifs within single-colour stripes, allowing the pattern to emerge through stitch texture rather than colour changes.
• Fair Isle Colourwork: Two-colour snowflake patterns worked using the stranding method for multi-coloured stripe sections.

Materials

The Lucky Seven Snowflake Blanket is designed to be worked in DK weight yarn, making it suitable for creating a lightweight yet warm heirloom piece. The project requires knitting needles appropriate for DK yarn and multiple yarn colours to execute both the Intarsia and Fair Isle sections of the design.

Difficulty Level

This project is rated as intermediate difficulty, making it suitable for knitters with foundational skills who are ready to expand their technique repertoire. The combination of Intarsia and Fair Isle methods, along with managing multiple yarn balls and maintaining pattern accuracy, requires intermediate-level competency.