Jochet Works

This project started because of two reasons. (1) I had a lot of chunky yarn I received from a few different people as gifts. And (2) my supervisor at work was moving to a different department.

So what else do you do for someone, except bake a bunch of chocolate chip cookies and crochet them a nice basket to give them the cookies in? No? Just me? Okay… Well… you should. People seem to really appreciate that sort of thing.

Now, this basket wasn’t super big. I used one skein of chunky yarn to make the whole thing. For most of it, I just worked in a continuous round (not finishing off a row once I pass all the way around).

I started with a simple magic circle at the base and just worked the base by increasing outwards until I reached the size I wanted. I think for the smaller basket I started with 8-12 original stitches in the magic loop?

Once I had a decent base, I worked back loop only for one row to start working up the sides. From there, I just continued to work around the basket. It naturally billowed outwards, which was a nice effect.

Eventually, I did some decreasing towards the top of the basket in order to give it it’s shape. After I had that, I did one row where I skipped and reattached to make the handles, and then I did one row of all singles. This gave me the handles. This whole basket was done in single crochet. For the size and purpose of the basket, this was a pretty good choice of stitch.

However, I still had a LOT of chunky yarn…

So why not make more baskets?

In the end, I didn’t make several baskets. Instead, I used the three skeins of “blue” chunky yarn to make one bigger basket.

This basket started with closer to 12 stitches in the magic circle, I believe. It also was worked in all half-double (US) stitches. Mainly because I didn’t want it to take too long, but also because I wanted this one to have a little more sturdiness to it’s structure.

In the end, I think the basket pattern is pretty good. Although the big one has kind of a weird shape to it that I’ll have to address when I make it again…

Any questions, comments, or concerns? Let me know!

Thanks for reading.

-Jo