Back to the Beginning

My first knitting project was a washcloth. I still maintain that's a great first project. It's small, uses only knit stitches, can be jazzed up as you gain more skills, and washes dishes extremely well regardless of how misshapen it may be. (And it may be very misshapen, as my first washcloth illustrates.)

Recently a friend asked for some washcloths. I eagerly went to the basket of cotton yarn I keep for just such occasions and cast on.

First, I did a leaf one. I hadn't knit that pattern before, and it was good fun.*

Then I tried a Chinese Wave pattern. This one is nice because the slipped stitches are all slipped on the wrong side, which means you're not constantly flipping your yarn from the front to the back as you would be if you were slipping on the right side. It's a small change, but it makes the pattern much faster. The pattern called for each row to be 45 stitches. I cut it down to 41 and it still seemed really large. I stopped when I ran out of that color yarn, and it seems to be a good size, although a tiny portion of my brain keeps muttering, "It should've been a square." That part is just being difficult. After all, hands are vaguely rectangular, so why wouldn't washcloths be?

Then I did The Washcloth, the first pattern I've ever knit.

It felt really good to go back to the beginning.

*I wanted to write "good, clean fun" since it was a washcloth, but I refrained... until I got to the footnotes. It was the best I could do.