Last time I showed you five of my recent batch of nine crocheted baskets; here are the remaining four.
Cabled Urn
I wanted to play with crochet cables on this basket, those lovely stacked front post stitches. I kept it simple – I experimented with crossed stitches and stitches that were at strong angles, and it appeared to me that in basket form I was best off keeping to individual, discrete cables, which I made with front post double crochet. They wander back and forth within a three-stitch width, moving one stitch per round. Amazingly, I don’t remember pulling out many stitches because of getting the cables in the wrong place.
I don’t know whether it’s the cables or the basket sinking a bit under its own weight (or both!), but the way this basket is narrower in the middle than at the top or bottom is very appealing to me and the reason I think of it as an urn. The darker stretch in the center probably enhances the effect – this basket was made with a strand of brown, a strand of green (although three different greens from beginning to end) and a strand that variegated between brown, white, and purple.
The top edge is alternating double and single crochet stitches. You have to poke the double crochet stitches to the outside by hand but it turned into a nice finish; visual continuity with the cables without trying to extend or duplicate them.
Big Dotted Basket
This basket got a leeeetle big. But it’s now exactly full with the materials for one craft project, so actually, it was just right.
Although they aren’t nearly as pointy, the dots are almost the same mini picot as on the top edge of last post’s sunflower bowl. Finish a single crochet, chain 2 and slip stitch in back bump of first chain. Continue with single crochet in the next stitch. They are 8 stitches apart and offset by 2 stitches per round; I started them one stitch into a round so I’d never be making one in between the first and last stitches in a round.
In the round after the picot, when you reach it push it to the outside and stitch in the single crochets before and after, keeping it as tight to your other tension as possible. I found the picots didn’t achieve full polka-dot-ness until two rounds after.
I also found it was remarkably easy to forget a picot and ended up pulling out and restitching probably 25% of this basket to add ones I’d missed.
In the top round I wanted to continue the dotted idea and used puff stitches periodically. I also left some unused back loops to attach handles. The handles are each composed of two rows: one all chains, and one that begins and ends with chains but is double crochet into the other chain in the middle. I’m pretty meh on how they turned out but I’ll probably experiment more with handles in the future.
Strawberry Pot Basket
I had a question: could I make little outcropped pocket/openings on the side of a basket like strawberry pots have? The answer is yes; the new question is whether a basket with strawberry-pot-like outcropped pockets has a purpose in this world.
The basket is mostly single crochet in joined rounds. The pockets are (half-double crochet, double crochet, chain, double crochet, half double crochet) all in the same stitch. In the next round, skip the whole lot and chain 1 instead, and in the round after that single crochet in each sc and around those chains.
The top is alternating half double crochet and triple crochet, because I felt the need to amp up the cabled urn’s edging. To finish I made a round of slip stitches from the inside; I thought tightening it up would be good for the strawberry pot look, but I didn’t want the ring of loops showing.
Out of Season Icicles
At this point I thought I might as well start treating my baskets as individual art projects, with their own names. Out of Season Icicles is an idea I had for making a double-spiral basket more unified, with front post double crochet cables of each pair of yarns crossing the rows of the other yarns. I started them gradually so they would be varying heights, with a long spike stitch down to the previous row of the same yarns to begin. The first front post double crochet is actually around the front loop of the spike stitch rather than the post, to make it a point at the bottom of the cable – otherwise it more resembled an arrowhead.
Side note: this was the only basket in this post crocheted in a spiral instead of joined rounds.
I messed up the beginning; I increased as though each spiral was independent, which meant I got into rippled hyperbolic plane territory pretty early and had to hit the brakes on increases to get it to somewhat flatten out again. It seemed to fix itself, though it doesn’t want to lie flat except when I’ve just hand-blocked it in place. At the end I stopped each pair of strands halfway across from each other and did a needle join in the second stitch to finish off.
To get an “eave” at the top I started a new round with all four strands together and a larger hook (K/6.5mm), and increased in every other stitch (not sure why I decided to increase SO much), completing the connection to the icicles by making fpdc with only the appropriate two of the four strands, back to all four for the last YO of the stitch. I finished by using an even larger hook (N/9mm) to make crab stitch in every other stitch.
Incidentally, I discovered I have two N hooks and they are not the same size – one is 9mm and one is 10mm. This is odder because they are both Boye. The larger one was purchased this spring; the smaller sometime early in my crochet career, probably winter 2010-11.
Anyway. I like the idea of this, and may come back to it, but the basket did not come out. How much of its sagginess was the messed up beginning (possibly most of it), how much the unnecessary increases at the end, and how much the awkward tension of the fpdc I can’t say, but this is one melted-looking icicle basket.
Tune in eventually for another episode of Crocheted Baskets!