the tale of the pseudo-dishcloth
My mom came to town last month for a weekend visit. Like all good daughters, I love my mother dearly. I recognize that I have depended on her for many things throughout my life, and that I continue to. Still, I find that I am much more hesitant to accept these things if I have to spend more than 20 minutes in her presence. I know that sounds terrible, but it's true. I've never felt all that close to my family, so visits really put me on edge.
Cozy (the stole, not the iPod case) has been eating away at my soul for some time now. Maybe it's because the yarn isn't exactly the color I'd envisioned when I bought it---I wanted more of a cream than a tan. Maybe it's because it's a solid color and I'm tired of dully working on repeat after repeat. Maybe it's because I had sturggled for several weeks to get through a repeat without some irritating little mistake nagging at me until I ripped back to fix it. Either way, between Cozy taking forever and my mom coming to visit, I needed something new, fast.
A dishcloth! Of course. I found the basic pattern online somewhere (where it was now escapes me, but I'll keep looking) and modified it slightly for my purposes. The biggest change was probably changing the garter stitch to seed stitch. But I also thought it was weird how the pattern called for a buffer, if you will, after each of the fern-like lace bits. What I mean by that is that there would have been a buffer on the far left of the cloth, right next to the overall border, and no corresponding buffer on the right. I ditched the third buffer, and knit away.
That's the unblocked dishcloth, showing off my favorite pattern of colors. Had there not been a random break and knot in the middle of the ball, it probably would have continued to pool this way. It's so frustrating when something like that happens, but I wanted to only finish up this ball (some color or another of Lily's Sugar n' Cream), which I had already broken into slightly when I was knitting Clapotis.
And so the dishcloth sits in blocked form. Clearly, the pooling got very obvious and awful, but I'm willing to live with that. Mostly I just love that even without pinning while it dried, it still opened up quite a bit.
I should note, however, that my mission to use only this one ball failed. I ran out of yarn 2/3 through the bind off row, and had to break into another ball. That, folks, is what we in the business like to call real-life tragedy.
This image should make apparent why I have been tentatively calling this the pseudo-dishcloth. Just in case anyone hasn't quite figured this out yet, it's pretty much perfectly-sized for a washcloth. I realized this as I was knitting, of course, but I would have had to unravel the whole thing and add an extra fern repeat to make it wide enough for what I wanted. Of course, I do have one last almost completely full ball of the stuff---hopefully that will be enough to make a bit of fabric large enough to sit in my fruit bowl. In any case, for the moment the pseudo dishcloth is sitting on my kitchen table under the vase that never gets used. I refuse to use it to wash my face. C'est la vie?
[Edit] Finally! The pattern is called the Baby Ferm Stitch Dishcloth, and can be found here.
Cozy (the stole, not the iPod case) has been eating away at my soul for some time now. Maybe it's because the yarn isn't exactly the color I'd envisioned when I bought it---I wanted more of a cream than a tan. Maybe it's because it's a solid color and I'm tired of dully working on repeat after repeat. Maybe it's because I had sturggled for several weeks to get through a repeat without some irritating little mistake nagging at me until I ripped back to fix it. Either way, between Cozy taking forever and my mom coming to visit, I needed something new, fast.
A dishcloth! Of course. I found the basic pattern online somewhere (where it was now escapes me, but I'll keep looking) and modified it slightly for my purposes. The biggest change was probably changing the garter stitch to seed stitch. But I also thought it was weird how the pattern called for a buffer, if you will, after each of the fern-like lace bits. What I mean by that is that there would have been a buffer on the far left of the cloth, right next to the overall border, and no corresponding buffer on the right. I ditched the third buffer, and knit away.
That's the unblocked dishcloth, showing off my favorite pattern of colors. Had there not been a random break and knot in the middle of the ball, it probably would have continued to pool this way. It's so frustrating when something like that happens, but I wanted to only finish up this ball (some color or another of Lily's Sugar n' Cream), which I had already broken into slightly when I was knitting Clapotis.
And so the dishcloth sits in blocked form. Clearly, the pooling got very obvious and awful, but I'm willing to live with that. Mostly I just love that even without pinning while it dried, it still opened up quite a bit.
I should note, however, that my mission to use only this one ball failed. I ran out of yarn 2/3 through the bind off row, and had to break into another ball. That, folks, is what we in the business like to call real-life tragedy.
This image should make apparent why I have been tentatively calling this the pseudo-dishcloth. Just in case anyone hasn't quite figured this out yet, it's pretty much perfectly-sized for a washcloth. I realized this as I was knitting, of course, but I would have had to unravel the whole thing and add an extra fern repeat to make it wide enough for what I wanted. Of course, I do have one last almost completely full ball of the stuff---hopefully that will be enough to make a bit of fabric large enough to sit in my fruit bowl. In any case, for the moment the pseudo dishcloth is sitting on my kitchen table under the vase that never gets used. I refuse to use it to wash my face. C'est la vie?
[Edit] Finally! The pattern is called the Baby Ferm Stitch Dishcloth, and can be found here.
Labels: dishcloth
posted by Jackie at 5:57 PM
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