A Box of Crochet Vegetables

This has, without a doubt, been one of my favourite crochet projects ever. After two quite repetitive, long term crochet projects - the blanket and the cardigan - I really enjoyed the variety of colour and pattern these vegetables offered, and the fact that you could start and finish one in an evening or two.

I enjoyed every part of it: choosing the patterns, deciding which shade or colour yarn would work best, the crocheting, watching the vegetable take shape when stuffed, adding the leaves. 

And then, as each one was finished, arranging one of my creations with the real thing and taking a photo. So much fun. (Also - visits to our local greengrocer and our consumption vegetables increased too, both of which are good things.)

I made these for the Year R* class in the school I work in. I've always wanted to crochet some food but Bella and Angus are too old for toys like play food now, so there seemed little point. But after a chat with my teacher friends, I realised I could find a good reason to crochet a radish and use up some of my huge bag of cotton yarn scraps. Win-win. These vegetables now live in the Home Corner, where they will no doubt be soon be covered in snot, paint and grubby fingerprints, as they rightly should be, but the cotton yarn and acrylic stuffing should make them easy to clean. 

I made eight in total, enough to fill a box but not too many. I could've gone on and on - pumpkins, courgettes, corn-on-the-cob - but restrained myself. I tried to stick to vegetables that the children would be familiar with and recognise immediately, like carrots, onions, potatoes and tomatoes, whereas the radish and beetroot just pleased me immensely with all their frilly leaves. 

For about a week after I finished them I arranged them on the shelf in the dining room and just enjoyed looking at them every day. They are so tactile and wonderful to handle, and I love the colours. I will definitely make some more for myself, just to have around the house, to use as decoration.

I don't think there always needs to be a reason to crochet something like this. When I think how much pleasure I got from working on this, how much fun it was just to play with the colours and textures, I think that's reason enough.

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The patterns are all from a brilliant American e-book I found on Amazon called Crochet Food. 35 Crochet Patterns of Fruits and Vegetables.

All yarn is cotton DK - mercerised and unmercerised- in various brands I've collected over the years, crocheted on a 3mm hook.

I did amend a few patterns in places, adding or removing rows or changing colours to make the vegetable more like what we'd see in a British supermarket.


* Year R, or "Reception", is the first year in the British school system. Children start the September after their fourth birthday. It is more similar to what other countries might call Kindergarten than the kind of education that starts when they enter Year One.