Knitting: Dishcloths

I've been making a pile of dishcloths in the last few weeks, mainly because I realized that I have an entire banker's box filled with cotton yarn. That, and the fact that dishcloths are fun, quick, and useful.

This first cloth is called Eyelet Border Facecloth and is available for free.

Here's a closer look at the actual stitch pattern:

Like most people, I knit tighter than I purl. That made it nearly impossible to work the purl rows in the pattern stitch. To compensate, I switched to a larger needle for my knit rows and used the smaller needle for the purl rows. I only went up one needle size this time, but I may try two needle sizes next time. It worked, but it was still a little tight.

I love this pattern because it’s nice and tight, but I think it really needs a top and bottom edging that match the sides. That was the only thing that I didn’t like.

Since I have such small hands, I wanted to make a dishcloth with a lighter-weight cotton. Since that's almost impossible to find outside of a local yarn store (which I don't have handy) or a catalog (which I didn't want to spend shipping for), I recycled a thrift store sweater in a lovely tangerine color for this one.

The pattern is called French Stripe Dishcloth and is available as a free download at Ravelry. As you can tell, I eliminated the stripe, although I do love the look of it. I just didn't have a second cotton yarn in the same weight at the moment, and this was an experiment to see how well it would hold up.

Following the instructions exactly (except changing to a smaller needle), my dishcloth came out to 6” square.
It used about 0.5 oz of this recycled cotton.

The last little project for today is a Tribble Scrubbie, which is available as a free Ravelry download.

This was a fast and fun knit, but I had a hard time gathering it when it was done. I think it has something to do with the thick cotton yarn rather than the pattern, since I've crocheted something similar in a linen/cotton blend and had no trouble gathering it.

I used up scraps for this scrubbie, which is a concept you know I love. However, it's not my absolute favorite scrubbie. You'll have to wait until I can get pictures of my favorite one. :)

Do you have any favorite knitted dishcloths? I'd love to hear about them. They make great take-along projects when we go out thrift store shopping for a day.