It’s July and too hot to be doing much with yarn. I am working on a project for a book to be published by somebody else. I hope I can get it done in time.

But meantime, cleaning up the kitchen this morning, I got to thinking about dishrags. Lots of people weave them on the looms, Sis is one of them. I have also done it but mostly for the how-to pictures. I have clung to my sponges. But awhile back Sis gave me a stack of her old faded ones to use as rags in the shop or somewhere. I just shoved them in the kitchen towel drawer. The other day I got a bug to clean out the overflowing drawer and remembered seeing on someones blog that she had a basket in her kitchen filled with old dishrags, etc to use as clean up rags and save paper towels so I got out one of my hand made baskets (arthritis won’t allow that anymore) and put them all in it. And have started using them for that purpose. And I think I am converted! They are easy to rinse out and hang on the edge of the sink to dry. It was too easy to toss the sponge into the sink where it probably grew some really nasty stuff. I know I went though a lot of them. I remember reading in a “green” magazine that it was actually cheaper and more energy efficient to  use paper towels. The author if this piece having proved to herself that the manufacture and delivery of the paper towels saved more energy that the washing of dish cloths. I am going to equate the making of the paper towels with the manufacture of yarn, energy wise. And I refuse to think of the “energy” spent weaving the cloths as effecting the global climate, so will skip to the washing. If you ran a batch just for the dishrags, yeah, that would count, but who does that? You toss the in with whatever batch seems appropriate to your style of doing laundry and as that energy would be used with or without the cloths that also can’t be counted against your ‘carbon footprint’. So it seems to me that the handwoven cloth is going to come off ahead however you look at it. There’s a little water used to rise the cloth but I usually rinsed the sponges and often the paper towels as I use the tough ones so that can’t add to much.

And more to the point… The dishrags woven with kitchen cotton do a much better job of cleaning! That’s really the part that converted me. I am going to have to weave a few more of these handy bits. I’ve had some people tell me they use them as wash cloths, too. I’ll have to give that a try next.