Life has been astonishingly busy for the past few months. My feet haven’t touched the ground since the end of exam time; I blew a fuse and booked a holiday to Spain to recover, which was most unsustainable but a wonderful, relaxing break in a beautiful, unspoilt spot with crystal-clear water & lots of much-needed sunshine. And cheaper than the area we normally go to, where our relatives live, too. Now we’ve survived the trauma of A level results (they both did really, really well) and are preparing to send two of the Offspring out into the world, whilst “Real Life” continues to whirl past at breakneck speed. And I’ve discovered dishcloths!
I signed up for a dishcloth swap on one of my favourite forums (Creative Living – originally a wild seedling that popped up from HF-W’s River Cottage site) and started looking on Ravelry for suitable (free) crochet patterns. Needless to say, there are hundreds to choose from; I now have a complete file full of intriguing little patterns awaiting a spare moment or two… I picked one that particularly appealed, grabbed a ball of charity shop yarn that I was virtually certain was cotton, and started hooking. About an hour later, I realised that I’d forgotten to translate it from American to English (we call different stitches by the same names) but it was so nearly finished that I just carried on. The resulting item was both pretty & practical and hardly took any time or concentration; an ideal stick-it-in-your-pocket-for-quiet-moments project, in effect. So I hunted up another couple of balls of cotton, one recycled from an unpicked beach bag and one left over from another project, and made a different one, then another – I’m hooked, in more ways than one!
Dishcloths are soooo simple. They only take a couple of hours and they’re an ideal project for using up odd scraps. Each one can be different and you can afford to experiment, as on that scale it only takes a moment to put any glaring incongruities right. It doesn’t matter if they don’t lie flat or aren’t completely regular in shape. And they’re useful too, which makes them a decently thoughtful little gift for anyone who doesn’t like aimless clutter, or already has quite enough of it, like us. I picked up a couple of cones of almost-certainly-cotton yarn at the Dorset Scrapstore (which I’m just about to pick the expert brains over on Ravelry for a proper ID for) and carried on…
There are probably 1001 other things I should be doing or sorting out, but these are keeping my fingers busy, using up oddments, and probably keeping my blood pressure down too. In other words, dishcloths are a practical recycler’s dream…
A recycled lifestyle... 