This pattern has been on my radar for a while, I’m a big fan of colourwork and enjoy a blanket project from time to time. I loved the idea of the mix and match building theme and I have a friend who lives in Copenhagen so it’s perfect.

It all came about because I wanted to thank a generous friend of mine. He has been very helpful over the past coupe of months so I wanted to make a gift to repay our thanks. My boyfriend who does pottery made him a vase so it was time to put my skills to use and knit him something. As he lives in Copenhagen I have been wanting to knit him this blanket for years and now I had the perfect reason.

I knit the Copenhagen Building Blocks (link to Ravelry) by Jake Henzler. This pattern contains six main charts with extra features. The beauty of this design is you can mix and match all the different elements. Add different door arrangements, roof types and frieze designs to the base charts to get a whole array of different houses. Your imagination is your only limitations, just by simply changing the colour you can change the look of a building. You can knit as many blocks as you like and sew them into anything from a cushion cover to a blanket, I have even see someone make them into a scarf.

They are knit flat as separate stranded colourwork blocks that involve carrying the floats along the wrong side while knitting back and forth. I would say that some experience in carrying and catching floats in stranded knitting would be handy but that being said the blocks are small enough that this makes a good stranded colourwork practice project. The designer has included useful info on how to manage and catch your yarn to avoid long floats on the wrong side. As I was knitting I did sometimes get a little tangled with the designs that had bigger distances between the windows and required more catching of the yarn. To minimise this I tried to twist the yarn in different directions so they would stay relatively untangled. I know some knitters really don’t enjoy knitting colourwork flat because managing yarn on the wrong side can be a bit trickier, but actually I don’t mind at all and had no problems with it.

I found them a great travelling project even though they had multiple colours they were small enough for me to knit on the train and the bus into work. I was averaging about three houses every two days and the whole blanket took me about six weeks to finish. I knit thirty two houses in total using a mixture of the different elements and I blocked each house separately to the same size to make it easier to sew them all together. I prefer to do this with a blanket because blocking the finished thing is such a mammoth undertaking and if all the elements are blocked and looking good I don’t need to worry about doing it again. I sewed all the houses into strips and then the strips together. Finally because I thought it deserved a little bit of a border just to neaten off the edge I picked up 1100+ stitches around the entire circumference. Picking up one stitch for each stitch along cast off and cast on edge and two stitches every three along the left and right row ends. This ratio ensured the fabric didn’t warp or pinch in. I knit a few rows of garter stitch, increasing two stitches at the corners every other row so that it wrapped around the corner neatly. I finally finished with a contrast i-cord which took hours but looks so smart.

The pattern recommends a 4ply knit on 3mm needles but as they are blocks you can adjust the yarn thickness if you prefer something a bit chunkier and adjust the needle size accordingly. I chose to stick to the 4ply and knit them in Pickles Pure Wool because I have be eyeing up this yarn ever since we got it in. I love the colours and the crisp woolly feel of it I knew it would be prefect. I chose nine colours to work with: Krutt, Snøskred, Røyksignal, Fjelltopp, Daglilje, Malte Mandler, Stamme, Åpent Hav and Løve. The thing that I really love about this yarn is the depth the colours have, they are rich and heathered and really interesting. Pickles Pure Wool is a 100g, 4ply yarn with a crisp twist that is both bouncy and structure. It has a slight rustic quality to it which reminds me a little of a Shetland yarn. It has a wonderful definition which gives such crisp colourwork detail and the woolliness gives the grip you need for defined edges. It is one of the yarns that will reward you the longer you have it.

I used just under 200g of the black and under 100g of each of the colours. It totalled out at about 550g of yarn. I have plenty of colours left over I am thinking I will knit up the Flea Sweater with the leftover bits:

To find out more about the yarn and for some project inspiration check out Maya’s earlier blog post: New Year – Pickles Pure Wool.