I said I’d never make a dishcloth!

Why would anyone want to knit a dish cloth? Knitting requires time. Each stitch is worked individually. You don’t sit down at the sewing machine and knock off a dish cloth in a few minutes. I don’t know how fast others knit, but the simplest little dish cloth is going to take me a few hours. Then after it is done, what? It gets used! Thrown in soapy water, sloshed around, mangled and soon, stained. It seems like a waste of effort. Knitting should be something to be oohed and ahhed over, something to be worn and attract compliments, a shawl or a sweater perhaps. Who is going to admire a dishcloth?

Nor do I remember the women in my family knitting dishcloths. Perhaps other grandmothers did. The cotton dishcloths sold when I was a girl in the 1950s were loosely woven. Were they based on dishcloths some women had made? I don’t know. I remember my grandmother and older aunts using rags, never a hand knit dishcloth. If knitting dishcloths was something passed down through the generations, it skipped my family.

But I had a little hemp yarn left from the Cool Hemp Ponchette, not enough for a bag. I know from my own experience that hemp is very strong and gets softer the more it is washed. And I’ve read that it has antibacterial properties. I needed a mindless project, something to work on while watching the evening news or visiting with family.

I need to improve some of my knitting for the Masters program. I have to learn to make a seed stitch without holes, cables and decreases without stretched stitches. Hemp isn't the best fiber for working on tension, it has a will of its own. But it is good practice. So I knit a dishcloth.

To make it more interesting, I knit it on the diagonal:

Cast on 3
Knit 2 rows,
K2, yo, seed stitch until 2 stitches before end, k2,
Repeat until half of yarn is used, then start decreasing,
K1, K2tog, yo, seed stitch until 2 stitches before end, K2,
Repeat until 3 stitches remain, knit 3, turn and bind off.
And because I still had yarn, I added a border in single crochet.

Easy enough!

I don’t do anything half way. I jump in with both feet. So, when I decided to knit one dish cloth, I also decided to order some Peaches & Creme to knit more. There were so many colors to choose from and I figured shipping was less per ball the more balls I ordered, so I now have 24 balls of Peaches & Creme.

This fall I’ll be working on the quality of my stitches while making dish cloths to wrap Christmas cookies and breads to give as little gifts. Unfortunately I didn’t buy any Christmas colors. I have to order those now.