Crochet cube

Crochet is brilliant, don't you think ? I find it such a relaxing hobby, playing with yarn of all varieties and colours of the rainbow, and I love the fact that crochet projects can be so diverse - from a tiny flower to a humungous blanket, from a simple washcloth to a complicated openwork shawl. In fact that pretty much sums up what I love about crochet - colour and diversity. And for me the diversity is best demonstrated by the use of crocheted squares.

On the subject of rainbow brights and square-ness, for a while now, on and off, I've been working on a fun project for our playroom. We have a two seater sofa in there, and with 3 Little People ...... well it doesn't take a genius to work out the problem. So I thought I'd make a little cubey stool type thingammybob for them to sit on, put their feet on, roll around the room, use for den-building, and so on. Inspiration struck at some point around Christmas and I decided to make it in the style of a Rubik's cube. (I used to LOVE my Rubik's cube, I could nearly solve it. All but the last 4 middle edge bits. Totally forgotten how now, but still it holds a fascination for me ....)

Anyway, I saved the cardboard from parcels that arrived, mostly by amazon, at Christmas time. And also from Very Important Wool Deliveries. I worked out that the width of three 4-round solid grannies crocheted together was about the right size for a Little Person to sit on, and then I made the right size of cardboard box out of bits of cardboard. With me so far ?

The box then had to be filled with something to make it stand up to the rigours of 3 ruffians. I decided to use layers of cardboard. Not sure if this was a good idea, it took Flipping Ages. Cutting cardboard is horrible, really hurts your hands, is blooming awkward and seems to take forever. But, forever later, I had a nice solid cardboard cube. Maybe not the easiest solution but it definitely works. 

For extra sturdiness I wrapped miles of packing tape round the whole thing.

Obviously each face of the cube needed 9 squares. And I wanted a solved Rubik's cube. No disorderly random chaos of mixed up pieces for me, thanks very much.)

9 of each of red, blue, green, yellow, orange and grey. The grey was instead of white which I thought would get pretty grubby pretty quickly. To be honest I always wished the Rubik's cube had had a purple face instead of white, that would have been much better balanced in terms of the colour wheel I think. Silly old Mr Rubik.

For each face I crocheted all the squares individually then joined them together using double crochet, in black, on the right sides. This gives a really nice definition to the indiviual squares.

I then used the same double crochet seam, again on the right sides, to join the faces together to make up the cube shape. 

Once 5 faces were joined together, I joined the last face on by one edge, then slipped the cover over the box - it fitted really well thank goodness! My measurements, amazingly, were right.

Finally I crocheted the last 3 edges with the cover in place (otherwise I wouldn't have had enough of a gap to get the cube in).

And ta-daaaa!! A Rubik's cube cubey thing :)

And there you go, a bit of rainbow coloured recycling crochet fun :)

Of course now they are arguing over who gets to sit on the Rubik's cube. Ho-hum.

Happy crocheting people :) 

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This post is my submission to the Deramores Craft Blog Competition 2015. Deramores is the UK’s number one online retailer of knitting and crochet supplies. Visit www.deramores.com for more details.