I’ve been knitting off and on since I was 9 years old, and had yet to make a single dishcloth. Denny and I were recently invited to a housewarming party on short notice by some of our hiking friends. I needed a quick gift, so decided to knit a few dishcloths to see what all the dishcloth buzz was about. I can’t say it was all that exciting. I was bored to tears with the first one, so I decided to make it a little more interesting by designing a few of my own. I got the idea for my “Jay + Ann Hiking” dishcloth from this woman:

http://digknittydesigns.blogspot.com/2008/08/hiking-knit-...

I didn’t use her pattern, and I’m sure mine isn’t exactly the same. But I did get the idea of the hikers with walking sticks from her Web site. I just got out my ordinary graph paper and started X-ing out the design. I used ordinary graph paper because that’s what I had handy. However, I’ve attached a couple of templates below that you can download to print and design your own dishcloths. I laid out the templates with knitter’s graph proportions. One has a seed stitch border, and the other has a garter stitch border. If you use regular graph paper as I did (bigger squares, so easier to see), keep in mind that your design will look taller and skinnier on paper than it will when knitted up. This is because the rows of knitting take up only about 2/3 of the space that an equal number of stitches (across) will occupy. Knitter’s graph paper will give you a truer picture of the finished product, though even this template isn’t quite right for me:

http://www.sweaterscapes.com/lcharts3.htm

That’s why I designed my own templates which I’m sharing with you via the links below. These are not to scale. They are just to be used as a design tool.

From this woman, I learned how to block the dishcloths so that the design will stand out:

http://rachelsknittingcorner.blogspot.com/2010/04/how-do-...

This worked rather well, though one of my blocking attempts was a disaster, due to no fault of my own. Needless to say, I won’t be buying any more Sugar n Cream dishcloth cotton yarn – at least not the “Naturals” line or any of their red, pink or purple colors. I made all 5 of my dishcloths with Lily “Sugar n Cream” yarn. People told me that I could get two dishcloths out of one ball, but that proved to be false. There was only about ¼ ball left for all of them, and these dishcloths only measured 9 x 9” using size 7 knitting needles. I discovered that the solid colors have more yardage (2 oz) than the variegated balls (only 50 grams for approximately the same price).

All the colors were colorfast except for the last one. The label gave no warning, and since I’d rather not take any chances, I’m going to be buying some other brand from now on. I wasted a lot of valuable time on that last dishcloth which I didn’t feel I could give as a gift due to the extreme fading. Ironically, before it met the cold water, that ball was my very favorite color combo. I wish I had taken a picture of it BEFORE I did the blocking just so you could see the “before” and “after”. It looked very pretty, and very “Pennsylvania Dutch”, so it’s such a shame that they can’t make it colorfast. After blocking, it was no longer ecru, and there were big blotches of red and a greenish yellow throughout. It looks awful now, and of course, my white towel was ruined. When I last visited my local Michael’s, I showed them the yarn and the dishcloth side-by-side. Although shocked, they did not remove this product from the shelves. Therefore, other knitters are going to be sadly disappointed and waste a lot of time as I did. And they may find that other clothes in their washing machine are ruined as a result. I sent an email to Lily, but so far, they have not replied back.

Some tips about designing dishcloths like this… Keep them as simple as possible, and try to avoid using just one line of Xs in your design because that will tend to get lost when you knit them up. Also, solid colors will make your design stand out more than the multi-colored yarns. And thanks to Jay and Ann for having such short names!

Here are some links to the patterns I used as well as my blank dishcloth templates:

http://www.knittingparadise.com/t-31914-1.html