I finished the sugar’n cream dish cloth this week. It didn’t take long. Seed stitch goes quickly.
The tricky bit was trying to make sure I would use up absolutely as much of the yarn as possible in this dish cloth. The point of the exercise was to put something that had been discarded into productive use. Leaving a couple of feet or yards of extra fiber at the end of the project defeated that purpose.
Knitting uses up fiber at a rate of 3 times the length of the row for a normal row, and four times the length of the row for a cast on or cast off row, using most cast on / cast off stitches. Therefore, I measured the length of one full width diagonal row and x 3. I needed that length of yarn for each row. I counted the number of rows from the start of the corner to the full width of the dish cloth. I used the completed beginning corner for this.
However I wasn’t going to knit 40 full with Rose. I was actually only knitting have that much. Or at least, half the area represented by a square with one length. Therefore, I measured off enough yarn for 20 full with Rose. I tied this into a Hank.
Then I continue to knit with the remaining sugar and cream yarn until it was gone. When I was out of the rest of the yarn, I started knitting from the tied-off hank, decreasing one stitch at either side. This made the corner turn square.
I almost made it. I ran out of fiber just a few short rows from the end. I could have cast off at that point and had if I sided dish rag. As it happened, I have a cone of white cotton yarn, that came in the same bag is the sugar and cream, & I turn to that yarn to finish off the corner. The white is a little bit brighter than the white in the very gated yarn, but I suspect once I’ve used this dish cloth a timer to it will take on a general staying and nobody will notice.
Mission accomplished: turning an unwanted skein of cotton yarn into something that can be used for a couple of years, and then recycled. not to mention, I got a couple of hours of knitting out of the effort, too, and that’s always a good thing.
