KiYO

Here is a sweet little baby blanket that will help you become a twisted stitch pro in no time! KiYO is sized for strollers and car seats but is easily adjusted to be whatever size you’d like. It’s knit as one seamless piece so there’s no need to pick up and knit the border once you’ve finally made it to the end (who’d want to do that?!) The pattern is given for 7 different yarn weights to suit every season and level of patience:

Light Fingering
Fingering
Sport
DK
Worsted
Bulky
Super Bulky

I originally made a similar baby blanket for my sister-in-law using the “Chinese Checkers” stitch pattern from one of Barbara Walker’s Treasuries (I think the 3rd volume). I loved the playful look of it and since it’s hot down here in New Orleans, the large eyelets seemed practical for a baby that would be using it through summer. However the chart seemed unnecessarily complicated – with work required on both RS and WS. Not to mention that my slip-slip-knits never perfectly match my knit-2-togethers and it becomes quite noticeable when they’re in close proximity to one another.

So I did several experiments and came up with a new stitch pattern that fixes both these dilemmas – now work is only done on the RS, and instead of having three slip-slip-knits per repeat, there is only one! The result looks almost identical to “Chinese Checkers”. If you’ve seen the original stitch pattern you can see that a little bit of the star-burst effect is lost (long stitches stretching down into each eyelet) but I think the ease of knitting that comes with the new method – especially for something as large and repetitive as a blanket – is absolutely worth it.

The name “KiYO” comes from the instruction “Knit into Yarn Over” which is used to create the large eyelets (a mini-tutorial with photos is included in the pattern). Serendipitously it is also the Japanese word for ‘skillful’, ‘dexterous’, or ‘deft’ (器用 – kiyō) which is what we all aspire to be with our knitting!

(Don’t know how to do twisted stitches? Check out my tutorial here!)