How to Decorate with Fiber Arts

Knitting garments is great, but there’s something really fun about having knit, crocheted, woven, whatever you like to do items around your house. It’s a great way to show your love for fiber arts and a lot of home decor items like pillows and blankets can be great first or early projects when you’re learning a new craft because they don’t have to fit a person.

I was recently asked to contribute my thoughts on knitting home decor items to a post for Porch.com. It covers knitting, crochet and quilting and covers materials, stitches, things to make and more.

I talked about knitting stitches that are great for beginners to use in home decor projects, which reminded me of this great knit wall hanging I have in my office. It’s made with jumbo yarn so it literally takes minutes to stitch and I keep all my buttons and pins on it. So fun!

Do you have knit or crochet decor in your home? I’d love to hear about it!

For the past few years I’ve taken part in a Christmas in July blog hop that encourages people to get a jump on their making for holiday gifts.

I love to use yarn I already have for these projects in the hope that people will consider what they already have that they can use to make projects for themselves or to give as gifts.

This year it was a couple of knit baskets made using partial balls of yarn left in my stash from other projects.

They use the same basic pattern but the first one is made with two colors of bulky yarn, and the second used two strands of worsted weight yarn held together, which made the gauge about the same, but I cast on fewer stitches to make a smaller version.

The bottom of the basket is square, though you can make them rectangular if you’d rather. Then I just knit up the sides in rounds until I was about to run out of yarn. This gave both baskets rather short sides — maybe more like a tray than a basket — but you can keep knitting as long as you like to make the sides of your basket as tall as you want.

They’re worked in seed stitch, which keeps the edges from curling and adds a nice texture to the baskets.

Of course this also allows you to use even more odd balls from your stash. I’d love to make a big one someday combining lots of different yarn. I mean, I’d probably use it to store more yarn, but that’s a fine thing to do.

As it is, these little trays are great for sitting on your desk or bedside table to hold little things that always seem to appear there. I like to use one to hold the supplies for whatever project I’m working on, things like little scissors, my tape measure, a crochet hook, etc.

And they would make good gifts on their own or as a container to hold some other goodies if you like.

You can find the free pattern for these stash busting baskets over at Our Daily Craft.

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