Monday 21 June 2021

Knitted Boxes

I am very partial to geometric shapes so my latest knitting project, Square Nesting Boxes, was right up my street. A set of five nesting boxes, lined with plastic canvas so that they keep their shape.


As with most of my work now, this one ended up taking much longer than it should have done. I make lots more mistakes than I used to and it takes me a lot longer to realise where I'm going wrong. The tricky bit about designing a set of boxes like these is to adjust the height of each box so that, when they're all together, the tops are level. It took me a long, long time to realise that I had to trust the number patterns in my knitting, rather than the measurements.

There's a temptation to stick to the tension too rigidly, thinking that 'must' give you the size you want. This led to me having to completely re-knit the green box. Once I just followed the numbers, everything worked, even though normal knitting rules suggested it wouldn't.

Have I lost you? What I'm talking about is the difficulty of taming a flexible material - knitting - to make inflexible shapes. It dawned on me that, as long as the plastic canvas pieces were the right size and the knitting covered them, it didn't matter if the knitting had to stretch more or less, depending on the box. If you study the pattern, you'll see that the number of stitches for each size and the number of rows to be worked increase in a regular way. It all looks so simple but it took ages for the penny to drop.

Anyway, enough of that. Once I'd worked out how to get the sizes right, I enjoyed knitting these. I used a slipped stitch rib which is easily learnt and gives the boxes a nice touch of texture, as well as covering the plastic well.


It's nice, portable knitting that doesn't require too much concentration and completing each box is very satisfying. I chose the colours as I went along, following the order of the rainbow but picking shades that I thought would go well with the other boxes. As ever, I used Stylecraft Special DK for my boxes; the colours are Lipstick, Spice, Dandelion, Apple and Lapiz.


As normal, I had a lot of fun arranging the finished boxes for photos. Oh look, it's a leaning tower ...


You can use them as lids for each other too, although they make rather chunky lids. Still, this might be useful if you want to knit them as gift boxes.


They hold a surprising amount of crafty stuff which, of course, is what I shall use mine for.


I decided to call them 'Square Nesting Boxes', rather than just plain old 'Nesting Boxes' to leave my options open. I may try a rectangular set and, if I can get circles of 10 holes per inch plastic canvas, round ones. In the meantime, have fun with the pattern.

6 comments:

  1. Frankie - you amaze again and again! I am in the middle of your swing bag and will probably begin this project before I finish that one! Thank you again and again! Blessings to you.

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    1. At least most of my patterns don't take too long to knit!

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  2. Thanks for this free pattern. What a great idea and so useful.

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  3. ... which is unusual for me. Not many of my patterns are actually useful!

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  4. Thank you very much for the free pattern! I simply have to try it.

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    Replies
    1. You're very welcome. It's a fun knit (but then I would say that, wouldn't I?)

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