Two things inspired me to design this blanket. The first, and most important, was the birth of my first grandchild. The colors I have picked are as close as I could get to the colors of the baby’s bedroom. The second was an attempt to demystify Brioche or Fisherman’s Rib. It was a revelation to me to discover that Brioche and what my granny would have called Full Fisherman’s Rib are exactly the same fabric. (I’m going to use the term brioche from here on because it is quicker to type and to say.)

There seems to be an abiding belief in the knitting community that brioche is a completely different kind of knitting to “ordinary” knitting and requires special training and terminology. I think this is unhelpful. Admittedly it is harder to read than stockinette and more difficult to correct mistakes, but it’s basically just knits and purls.

Brioche is an example of a “tuck stitch” which is essentially when a stitch is worked through more than one loop. In this blanket, we are working two color brioche with pairs of colors, which results in vertical stripes with one color dominant on one side and the other color on the opposite side. Using a palette of five colors, and swapping the dominance and the order of the colors, leads to twenty different “looks” which is very exciting!

The blanket is knitted as a plain rectangle. Because I am a show-off and I want it to be useful for many years, not just for baby months, I have made it big! You can, however, make a rectangle in any size you wish. Just cast on an odd number of stitches, work the number of sections that suits you, then cast off again. I think that this would be a good project to use up scraps of DK yarn in as many colors as you have available.

The pattern is described in two sizes. You should be able to make the smaller size with 100g of each of five colors in the suggested yarns, and the larger size with 200g of each color with enough leftovers for a few little baby hats. The sample blanket is made in the larger size.