Knit a Little Easter Basket

There are a lot of patterns that I knit back when I wrote for About.com (does anyone even remember About.com?) that either can’t be found any more or can’t be found without a lot of digging through the Internet Archive.

I’m working this year on bringing some of those patterns back because I liked them, and they are often good, basic, skill-building patterns that I think people would enjoy making.

Such is the case with this little Easter basket.

I remember having so much fun knitting the first one (I took it to an event and knit the whole thing in a day) and when I was looking around for Easter knitting patterns to share, I realized I couldn’t find it anywhere. It was so far gone I had never even made a Raverly page for it!

Well all that has been resolved now. I found the old basket but I also knit a new one using yarn you can still buy (good old Lily Sugar’n Cream, but any worsted weight cotton is great for this one). I also made the new one a little bigger, partly on purpose and partly because my gauge came out a little different on the second one.

I still had a good time knitting it, and I still made it in a couple of hours over the course of a day.

These delightful little baskets are great for holding a little Easter candy on your desk, or use them all year long in the bathroom to hold cotton balls or swabs, or anywhere else you want to hold little things in a cute way.

You can grab the free pattern at Our Daily Craft, and I’m happy to report I finally made it a page on Ravelry, too, if you want to add it to your queue!

Any time of year is a good time for stash busting, but if you can combine it with knitting a blanket that will keep you warm when it (finally!) gets cooler that’s even better. Let’s take a look at some fun patchwork blanket knitting patterns.

If you want to keep it super simple, you can just make blocks of garter stitch and sew them together, like the beginner’s patchwork baby blanket from Mini Baa Baa or the color block blanket from Make and Do Crew. Both projects are worked in strips and sew together, with the baby version calling for two strands of DK or light worsted weight yarn held together and the larger one using bulky yarn.

Add a little more texture with the mixed blocks of the cottage quilt throw from Mama in a Stitch. This one combines garter stitch and seed stitch and uses worsted weight yarn. She used a crochet join to make the chains on top of the blocks, but you can join them however you like. It calls for eight colors but you can use what you have, and there are three size options.

Get a real sampler style patchwork blanket with this design from Knit Sew Make. It calls for worsted weight yarn and has four size options. All of the patterns just use knit and purl stitches so this one is still pretty easy for beginners.

If you want a more complex colorwork project that will keep you entertained all season, try the Peace by Piece blanket pattern from Needle and Feather. This one is made up of two color colorwork blocks and calls for worsted weight yarn. You can choose to use just a few of the blocks and repeat them more often, or make multiples of the whole set.

The knitted patchwork recipe from Martine Ellis (free on Ravelry) uses mitered squares in fingering weight yarn, so it’s perfect for using up all your leftover sock yarn and mini skeins. This one is a tutorial more than a pattern so you can make your blanket as big as you like or keep going until you run out of yarn.

Susan B. Anderson’s 100 Squares blanket (find it on Ravelry) has a lot of mitered squares, too, but they’re arranged in fun ways and includes some quilt inspired designs as well. This one also is a bit of method more than pattern but it sure looks like a lot of fun for using all the leftovers.

Of course you can totally improvise a patchwork blanket using the yarn and stitches you like, but I hope these patterns inspire you to look at your leftover yarn in a new way.

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