600 Patterns

According to ravelry, I have published 599 knitting and crochet patterns in the 16 years that I've been doing this malarky. To be fair, they count all the individual patterns of my partwork patterns but still ... it seems an awful lot. Once I realised this, I decided that pattern number 600 had to be something typically Frankie so I pushed aside my pile of finished stuff waiting to be written up and set to thinking.

I decided that it needed to be a bit unusual so that ruled out blankets, scarves and shawls (which are normally the most popular patterns) and, that decided, I thought it would have to use plastic canvas. Over the years, plastic canvas has been my ally when it comes to making knitted versions of three dimensional things - houses, boxes, all sorts of containers - it gives a firm structure to what is basically a floppy fabric.

At this point my eyes rested on these ...

I love little card suitcases and use various ones to store some of my many crafty bits and bobs. How difficult could it be to reproduce these in knitting? Pretty difficult actually. I've spent the last couple of months working on this problem, on and off. Very early in the day I abandoned the idea of a set of different size cases (not impossible but far too much work) but, even then, every single stage of this design had to be worked and re-worked two or three times. I got this far twice before even deciding on the stitch pattern to use.

I started off with stocking stitch, then a combination of moss stitch and stocking stitch (the box on the left) before finally deciding on slip stitch rib for both the inside and outside. As normal, this was a case of me going round the houses before coming back to the simple solution that was staring me in the face. I'd used this stitch pattern for containers before so why didn't I think of it in the first place? This sort of thing happens again and again when I'm designing.

See what I mean? Square Nesting Boxes and Round Nesting Boxes both use this stitch, they're both boxes that need to hold their shape and, as you can see, I knitted ten of them so you think I'd have got to this realisation a bit sooner wouldn't you?

Not that it was all plain sailing once I'd decided on the stitch pattern though. The front of the suitcase had to be curved. This was quite straightforward to design for the bottom of the case. Make a template, use it to shape the plastic canvas and then shape the knitting to match (sort of).

The problem came when I had to work out the curve for the lid. It took me ages (and a lot of trial and error) before I got the size of this curve right. Obviously, the lid had to be bigger than the bottom but the question of how much bigger to allow for the thickness of two lots of knitting (one of which you haven't actually knitted yet) is very difficult. I got there in the end though.

Those sides were another problem. Again, it was a question of working out the length of a curved piece of plastic that had to fit round the edge of another piece of plastic that had been covered with knitting, while also allowing for the sides to be covered too. In case you're wondering why the colour of the suitcase keeps changing, that's because I had to knit one to work out the pattern (the green one) and then knit it all again in pink so that I could take step by step photos. Stopping to do this the first time when I'm making so many mistakes is just too much hassle.

All the time I'd been working on this, I'd been considering how to make the fastening. The little metal toggles that close the card suitcases are lovely but I wasn't sure they'd work on my little knitted version and, anyway, they'd be difficult for people to find. The simplest solution seemed to be a big press stud and I designed a very nifty little black tab with a press stud underneath and a a knitted 'button' on top ... only to find that it didn't actually work because the plastic canvas wasn't firm enough to be able to press it closed. I was not happy.

After ignoring the thing for days, I went back to it, took the fastening apart and added two buttons and an I cord loop, another example of the simple ideas often being the best.

After all that, the handle turned out to be easy. It's just a narrow strip of plastic, covered with knitting and sewn on to the front. Once it was held securely in place, I found that I could bend the plastic to a more natural looking curve.

Having knitted two little suitcases and taken umpteen photos, I turned my mind to what you could put in them. I toyed briefly with the idea of deigning a mini doll to live in one, complete with a wardrobe of clothes before calming down and filing that away for another day. In the end I just found various knitting accessories to go in one of the cases for a photo. Amongst them was a little needle book, one of the many I've knitted over the years from an early pattern of mine. Looking it up, I found that it was actually my second pattern, published in 2008 so it seemed rather nice to refer to that in pattern number 600. 

As you can imagine though, this early pattern left a lot to be desired so I decided it was time to re-write and take some new photos. You can find the new version on ravlery.

Needle Book

This set me looking for other old patterns that I could link to this one and I found a couple more.

That's my Pincushion pattern from 2010 and the little triangular purse is one of my Magic Pockets which I designed six years later. I've updated both of those patterns too, mostly just taking some better photos (although I did experiment with a diagram for the magic pockets which may have made the construction clearer ... or not).

I put some stitch markers in that little yellow pocket. The suitcase also holds a pair of snips and a tape measure and there's still room for more. I can see me using one of those to hold a little sewing project too, maybe some paper piecing or a small cross stitch kit.

Which reminds me, I haven't told you how big these little cases are. They measure roughly 15 cm deep, 10 cm wide and 7 cm tall, here's one next to my pencil pot to give you an idea of scale.

Now that I've got pattern number 600 sorted at last, I can turn my attention to number 601 - but which one in the queue to choose? I shall have to have another think ...

Mini Suitcase