Crochet box: Design

It was quite the job putting this altogether! I designed this with many iterative sketches just so I could get it just right. 

I started out with a blank canvas for this project, I really didn’t know what I was going to build as a Christmas gift, but I knew that my wife had started doing a lot of crochet work, and that she really didn’t have a set place for all your supplies, plans and materials. So eventually I sketched what you see to the left. If you look at the finished product and this sketch you can see there had been quite a few changes made. I had initially thought of putting nearly a dozen drawers on the outside of this box with a spool rack inside of the box top behind a screen of some sort.

 

Going along with this design I redid the sketch and altered the front to have 4 larger drawers and the sides to have 4 smaller drawers, on both sides… Perhaps I was a bit over eager to make storage space.

Well as you can see I had to change the design again, this time on the inside. I decided to move the spool rack to the bottom and place a door hatch to cover them as well as hold them in place.

Now that the top of the box was clear of the spool rack idea, I decided to remove a few of the drawers from the design to make it a little less cumbersome.

But this was not enough, again I redesigned the inside to have larger drawer coves on the front boxes and decreased the capacity size of the hatch door and made the handle for it into a notch cut out of the door instead.

And I was not done there, I redrew it again, but this time I decided there was not enough space on the inside, so I needed to remove the drawers from the front and have two hatch doors in the base, one for spools and another for plans or yarn. You can see I was trying to make the design work for what her crochet needs would be; which is difficult considering I do not crochet!

 

The outside of the box would now be clear of cluttered box drawers. The factors for all of this decision making and redesigning were (in no particular order); looks, functionality, ease of use, weight, size and capacity. The three in bold were the main reasons driving the multiple redesigns.

FINALLY!

After several redesigns and calculations, I finally came up with the finished design! I decided that the weight and capacity of the box was too heavy and did not allow for much storage. So I removed two more drawers from both sides, and went back to a single hatch design. I also designed separation bins on top of each drawer cove to allow for more storage. As for the spool rack idea, I thought to myself;

(Self) Does she even use spools in crochet?

(My mind) Not that I noticed, she does with other types of crafting…

(Self) But not in crochet, this is a crochet box, not a craft box.

(My mind) True, so don’t include a spool rack.

(Self) Agreed.

So sorry, no spool rack, I can always build her one later if she would like. After my mind and myself had shook on it, I concluded that the box now met all of my criteria for design. I found the delicate balance between weight, size, functionality, capacity and looks. 

See the finished product here: Crochet Box