Knitting Today: Wedding Dishcloths

Dishcloths and washcloths are very good things to have around.  I enjoy making them.  Having said that I like making them, I need to mention that I don't always like to make every one of them identical.  It is useful to make them with different colors of yarn.  It is useful to make them with different patterns.  Most recently I have tried using different numbers of strands of yarn.

For a recent wedding I made up three dishcloths holding two strands together.  They seemed really nice to my hands.  I used the Grandmother's Favorite dishcloth pattern:  cast on 3 stitches of worsted weight yarn using size 8 (or 7 or 6, depending on your preferred tightness of stitches), knit 2, yarn over, knit to the end of the row.  On the first row you knit 2, yarn over, then knit 1. 


Normally I keep working up until I have 43 or 45 stitches on my needle, the begin decreasing stitches.  While making these dishcloths holding two strands of worsted weight cotton together I knit up to 35 stitches then began decreasing.  I think they came out well enough to give as a gift.  To make them a bit more unique I held a strand of one color all the way through for uniformity then added in the ends of other balls of yarn for added color.  They mostly came out with an acceptable (to me) appearance.  Even the orange held all the way through looked all right with a green held all the way through with it!

While doing this, I also made up a dishcloth holding three strands together (in honor of our National Holiday, the Fourth of July) but did not have enough of the blue to knit a full-sized cloth.  I tried using it as a dishcloth but it is really too thick for a dishcloth.  It will work very well as a hot pad though.