Knitting -- ditching the plastic, saving the earth

Being a Jewish Princess, I got annoyed when I couldn't count on my local store to have the right color sponges for my kosher kitchen. So I decided to ditch the plastic sponges, the way I ditched paper hankies four years ago.

We color code our kitchens to make sure we keep them kosher; the colors help us avoid mixing meat and milk, and we always keep some dishes free of both meat and milk residue for flexibility. My bread-making utensils are in this last class.

So I'm knitting all-cotton dishcloths.

My color choices are going to make you nuts, though, if you keep kosher.

The yellow is standard for the neutral dishes.

But my meat dishes are Corell with a green pattern so I made green for those.

And instead of using the standard blue for dairy, I used red which is standard for meat. I was using pink because my every day china has a pink rose pattern, but my fancy English bone china is Royal Doulton Old Country Roses, with red roses on them.

Anyhoo.  Use a 100% cotton yarn for dishcloths; there are free patterns online. I used Dishie, which is worsted weight.

I picked a bunch of textured patterns hoping they would help with light scrubbing. Then I wove my free ends into the corners to use on intermediate scrubbing. I have steel wool pads for the hard stuff.

It took about 3 hours to knit a dishcloth. I bought 3 190-yard skeins in each color. Different patterns use different size needles, but with size 7 straight needles I got 5 stitches and 5 rows per inch, so on a 10 x 9 inch dishcloth, there are 51 stitches x 58 rows or about 2,960 stitches per dishcloth, nearly 6,000 stitches per skein. The point was to have 6 cloths, one for each day of the week, leaving plenty of time to wash and dry them. I don't wash dishes on Shabbat.

Dishcloths are a great way to learn knitting. The first pattern I used started out with five rows of knitting, then a row of mostly purl stitches. One of the things I did with this pattern was improve my ability to purl with the yarn in my left hand, continental style.

For towels, use Dishie with designs that have limited patterns of lines, or texture, or are flat and plain.

Use size 4 needles for 7 stitches and 7 rows per inch, 15 x 27 inches, 105 x 190 stitches. Work the selvage as for a sleeveless tee and do k1/p1 rib at each end.   Or use size 3 needles with a 100% linen or 50/50 cotton/linen fingering or DK yarn.

With the lighter yarns, you could take advantage of Mary MacGregor's Fair Isle Knitting Patterns, with reproductions of scores of 1920s motifs collected by Robert Williamson; work the motifs in the central 95 x 188 stitch space. The weaving in will make the towel thick and less flexible than a plain or textured pattern.

Don't use Dishie with Fair Isle motifs. Fair Isle works with worsted wool like Wool of the Andes, because it's soft and lofty -- and remember, I said, my Fair Isle tops are a more solid fabric than when I knit plain or argyle, without that weaving in.  Dishie has no loft at all.

So this goes with my switchover years ago away from paper products. I'm not killing trees by switching to cloth hankies (only the box is made of recycled paper) or by using paper towels to dry dishes or my fingers.

Now I'm cutting back on plastic by not buying commercial sponges to wash dishes.

Yes, you have to wash dishcloths and towels and hankies every time you use them and you need to boil them out once in a while. Then you let them air dry. Remember, I can hang them out on my portable umbrella clothesline like my mom did when I was little.

I have to toss sponges after a month, even though I let them dry thoroughly between uses so they don't smell skanky. They toughen and eventually so much dirt gets into the nooks and crannies that they stop being safe to use.

My hankies have worked just fine for four years now and the dishware will do the same. Once the dirt won't come out of them any more, I can downgrade them for other uses like scrubbing floors or polishing the car. In the meantime, there are other projects to accomplish.