Britt's Blog

A long, long time ago, this double-knit scarf with stars caught my attention. I immediately thought “baby blanket!”

It was probably because of the blue and pink color scheme, but I also think that Elizabeth Zimmermann had a hand (as so often she does). In The Knitter’s Almanac, she says:

Double Knitting…always seems to me, though fascinating, a great waste of time…The knitting public, however, is intrigued by Double Knitting, so, as one of its members, you shall be given Double Knitting. Never one to waste time and effort, I have tried to incorporate four advantages, to make the undertaking worth while. First, Double Knitting is for some reason very light, relative to its bulk, and soft as a cloud if you make it in light, thick wool…with large needles. It makes a splendid pad when you lay the baby down on the hard floor for its kicking exercises. Second, it is the warmest of covers—warm as two blankets, which, of course, it is.

EZ goes on to give a third reason (specific to her project and thus irrelevant to our purposes here) but, curiously, no forth reason. Presumably, the reader is left to “unvent” a reason of her own. My own reason is that double-knitting is lots of fun.

EZ describes a method by which you knit across, slipping every other stitch, turn, and knit across the previously slipped stitches, slipping the previously knit stitches. I’ll agree with her that this method is frustratingly inefficient.

I prefer (as does, apparently, almost everyone else on the internet) the more modern method, which requires that you manage two strands of yarn at once, and knit the “front” stitches with one strand and purl the “back” stitches with the other. This has the same rhythm as a K1-P1 rib or seed stitch, which I find inexplicably soothing. No need to go over the row twice.

EZ also neglects the real charm of double knitting which is that by using two different colors, and working a color changes by switching front to back or vice versa, you automatically get a back that is precisely the inverse of the front.

This blanket is done in Caron Simply Soft Eco, which is nice and soft, cheap, machine washable and available the excellent deep purple and bright yellow colors I was looking for. As an added bonus, the blanket actually contains 3.6 recycled beverage bottles!

I made mine basically the same way the scarf is described, but bigger, with a moon thrown in for visual contrast.

If you’re interested in trying a tamer double-knit baby blanket, there’s the one mentioned above in the Knitter’s Almanac, under February, and there’s also a very charming dk blanket pattern at knitty.com.