Baskets, bowls, boxes all appeal to me for their potential — the potential to display, to organize, to finally clear the clutter. There’s also the joy of discovery of what’s inside a new little container. I love to shop for the perfect basket, but these days you’re more likely to find me making my own. The virtues of a crocheted container are endless — they don’t take much yarn, and you can mix and match odds and ends of any kind of fiber, (including all the fuzzy fibers left over from those scarves you made at Christmas!) so they’re great for stash-busting, they’re fast and easy to make — so they make fantastic last-minute gifts.
Black Cotton Bowl made with 1 ball Lily Sugar ‘N Cream Crafter’s Cotton
Collection of small bowls created by a student in my crocheted bowl class at Pins and Needles, Princeton
Go through your yarn collection — pull out anything you’d like to use up, or pick yarns that match your décor. Because you only need small bits, you could also use hanks of needlepoint yarn. As you’re building your bowl, keep the base simple (you can hold more than one strand together to get a thicker, stiffer fabric) and then add fun bits of yarn on the sides where they can be seen. You can drop and pick up colors or textures every few rows. Consider crocheting your bowl out of wool and felting it in the washing machine after you’ve finished crocheting it. Keep in mind your project will shrink considerably when you wash it.
Felted Bowl with Beads
Crocheting in the Round
Think of a hat in reverse: most containers have a circular base, but you can also crochet ovals and squares. Once you can crochet a flat circle, you can use it as the base for a handbag, a rug or trivet, chair pad, crown of a hat and of course, a bowl. The goal when crocheting in the round is to keep your work from curling, which is turning up at the edges, or buckling, which is becoming wavy instead of flat. To do this, you need to increase your stitches for each round at a steady but not too dramatic pace. Using a tight single crochet, the yarn can be easily worked to "stand up" on it's own in bowl shape.
The rate of increase can vary for different yarns, hooks, and tensions, so trial and error is part of the process—if your circle starts to curl, rip out to the last flat row, then increase faster, if it begins to buckle, again, go back to where it was flat and add at least 2 single crochets between increases. Or, add a row with now increases and then go back to your pattern. You need a bit of a Zen approach. I was reading a web site recently for fabric rug kits, and the kit maker advised talking to your rug and telling it to lay flat and “be a rug.” Before you go ripping anything out, block a bit. Your work will crumple in your hand while you’re crocheting. Lay it on a hard, flat surface and smooth it out with your hands—it may be flatter than you think. Here are some basic guidelines for a flat circle:
Ch 4. Join with a slipstitch.
Round 1: 8 sc into the center of your hole. Don’t join the yarn at the ends of rounds; instead just let your circle “spiral” onward.
Round 2: (sc in first stitch, 2 sc in next stitch)* repeat from * to the end of the round. [12 stitches]
Round 3: (sc, sc, 2 sc)* repeat from * to the end of the round. [24 stitches]
Continue building the circle, each row increasing less frequently (sc, sc, sc, 2 sc), etc.
Keep increasing until the circle is the size you want for your bowl. On the next round, single crochet in each stitch (no increases) in the front loop of each stitch. This will give your basket a nice clean edge. If you’d like a more rounded bowl look, single crochet normally in both loops of each stitch. Continue to single crochet until the bowl is the height you’d like. The top edge of your basket is a nice place for embellishment. Use a shell stitch or picot stitch as a decorative edge, or just switch to a nice contrasting fiber.
Fasten off, and weave in ends.
If you start to increase again towards the edge of the bowl you’ll get a look like this yarn basket here—created by a crochet student at Pins and Needles, Princeton , NJ:
There are a few neat examples of crocheted containers in print and in cyberspace. Erika Knight’s Simple Crochet has a beautiful crocheted basket that uses her pillow pattern as a base and works up. She’s also got some square boxes made from kitchen twine that look fun and functional. The Craft Yarn Council of America has some really big baskets crocheted from six strands of worsted weight yarn held together and a size Q hook! I’m sure those would be fast and fun to make.
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