Hat on Top, Coat Below
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Dishcloths
September 3, 2008
Because I generally don’t like to jump on bandwagons until they’ve been around the block a time or two, I didn’t try knitting dishcloths until last month. Perhaps if doing dishes were one of my jobs I would have been a less late adopter, but my big task is laundry, and I haven’t noticed any knitted laundry accessories craze to join in on.
Most knitted dishcloths are made with worsted weight cotton (Lily Sugar’n Cream and Pisgah Peaches & Cream being two popular brands), so of course I started my first with a DK weight cotton/linen blend (KnitPicks CotLin). I’m such a rebel. I had the CotLin in my stash to try out for a sweater I’m thinking of making (the Guernsey Cardigan pattern by Susan Mills), so rather than use a dishcloth pattern, I used the sweater pattern for the main part of the cloth, adding a seed stitch border to try and keep it sort of flat. I’d never done cables before, but these tiny ones (2 x 2) were pretty easy to do even though I used a crochet hook in place of a cable needle.
When I’d gotten about halfway through that first dishcloth, I felt confident enough to make one for the Suspects swap on Ravelry. For this, I did use Sugar’n Cream; I’d bought it under the influence of Amanda when she was here in April. I first tried the pattern on the ball band for a Feather and Fan cloth, but that worked up so wide that I could see I wasn’t going to end up with anything close to a square before I ran out of yarn in the ball, so I ripped that back and started on a pattern I’d found for a waffle stitch washcloth. That worked out much better, and unlike the cardigan cloth, it looks good on both sides.
After sending the waffle cloth off to my swap recipient I did another sweater swatch cloth, this time using the Cables & O’s pattern from the No Sheep for You book as my inspiration. This chart was harder to follow than the Guernsey one since it had yarnovers and decreases and stitches knit and purled through the back loop in addition to the cables and normal knits and purls. I didn’t do all the back loop stuff right at first and thought about ignoring it entirely but it really does look better to do it the way the pattern says so I persevered. I haven’t decided whether to make the cardigan from this pattern or the Guernsey, but since KnitPicks is out of the color I want until late September I don’t have to decide right away.