Dishclothing

I like making dish/washcloths.  I get to use colorful yarn and I can mix it up any way I want and no one will say that they won't wear it.  (not that anyone ever says that to me since I'm a mostly selfish knitter but you never know)  Last Friday night at knitting HH was working on a Double Thick Cloth and commented that she'd goofed up a row but was leaving it as a design element.  KW was knitting one with the same pattern and some cotton yarn she'd reclaimed from a failed shawl, and she spent most of her time trying to recover from a mis-knit row.  I said that I wasn't going to pull out my version of that project since the two of them had obviously filled the room with bad dishcloth juju, but then I couldn't resist pulling mine out and proving that the juju was just fine.  It wasn't.  I knit a row and tinked (k-n-i-t backwards) it.  Knit a row and tinked it.  Counted stitches (knit, purl, knit, purl...) and tried again.  I finally succumbed to the bad dishcloth juju and put it away.  When I got home, in better light and not laughing quite so hard, I discovered that I'd screwed up the row that I'd ended up on at home (what is so hard about "knit 1, slip 1"? evidently something but I don't know what it might be); that was what had set me on the road to failure.  It's all fixed now.  This pattern makes a lovely dish or wash cloth.  It's extra thick and squooshy and it doesn't get holey when it stretches out when it gets wet.


It was so un-busy at work on Thursday that Leftover Starfish Dishcloth #2 got finished and I didn't even have to tack on another color of yarn.  I wanted to.  I would have done it in a heartbeat, but the end of the starfish came before the end of the yarn.  There's very little of this color left so it'll make it into random colored dishcloth-land one of these days.  It's all a part of my "use up what you've got" plan this year.



Since I finished the Bandwagon Afghan on Wednesday (yay! it only took 1 year and 10 months of non-continuous work) I got out the next project in my Onesie queue--the Red Gold Cowl.  Once again the yarn's doing the work.  The pattern's a simple "here's how many stitches I cast on and what yarn and size needles I used and what ribbing pattern" type of pattern.  So I read her list of 8 or 10 cowls she'd made with this method, picked one and plunged in.  The yarn doesn't have any give but I think I like the way it's looking.  I might try doing mistake rib (rnd 1 [k2, p2]... rnd. 2 [k1,p2, k1]* repeat) now that I have a bit of k2,p2 ribbing done.  One thing I do like is she says, "I'm not too worried if the round is complete when I bind off.  I'd rather have used up all the yarn."  Now I just have to figure out when to stop knitting and start binding off.  I'll get there.