One of the gifts I received this year for Christmas was a handknit dishcloth from my little sister. I’m especially pleased about it because she’s still new to knitting and I wasn’t sure initially that she would really get into it, since I showed her how a few years ago, but hadn’t really heard much about it since. I’ve made a few dishcloths myself, but only for Dishrag Tag, or for the express purpose of giving them away to someone else, so I’d yet to actually try *using* a dishcloth of my own.
I have to admit, I am in love. I can’t see trying to actually scrub a dish with these things, since I suspect you’ll have to pry my green scrubby sponge out of my cold, dead, hands, but they are the perfect thing for keeping on hand on the sink, ready to grab at a moment’s notice to wipe down the counter or the table. And since I’ve been doing a lot of canning lately, there’ve been ample opportunities for me to need to wipe things down (making jelly is sticky work!).
So now that I am a dishcloth convert, the natural progression was to look at dish towels. When we were trying to figure out where to hang towels in the new kitchen, we came up with the brilliant idea of putting three little hooks on one side of the center island. The problem is that regular towels have a tendency to fall off every time someone walks by and brushes against them. Plus, most of our existing towels are old, and faded, and starting to get a little frayed around the edges.
What’s a knitter with a sizable cotton stash, and a need for dishtowels, to do? Find a pattern, do a little customizing (since we’ve got hooks instead of towel bars) and get to work.
I cast on for the first one on Christmas morning, and I was halfway through the second one by the time I went to bed Christmas night. Three hours of waiting for a whole pile of lemon peels to simmer slowly in sugar syrup (on their way to turning into candied lemon peel) meant there was plenty of knitting time to finish up the third towel this afternoon, and all it took was some weaving in of ends this morning and I was done.
Here’s a closeup of one of the towels. the pattern called for a much wider flap, that would fold over a towel bar (or the handle of an oven) and close with a button. I made a few slight modifications to make a shorter, thinner flap, and didn’t bother with adding the button, since I simply needed a hole through which I can put the towel hook.
And here is an action shot of all three towels.
I used a total of 5 skeins of some vintage Handicrafter cotton that was given to me a few years back. I’m pondering making an extra set of towels, just to have on hand when these are in the wash, since I’ve got 7 more skeins of that same cotton to use up, but I think that might have to wait a little while until my hands can recover from the nonstop knitting with cotton.