Building a Better Ballband Dishcloth

I keep a go bag loaded up with dishcloth fixings, for those occasions when I am running out the door and don’t have a good portable project on the needles.

Sometimes the go bag sits with a half-finished dishcloth in it for months, but I’ve always got a portable project. When the dishrag does get done, it gets swapped in for the most dilapidated shmattah in the dishrag drawer, which gets put in the rag bag. (The slow, toil-filled path of a dishrag to biodegradation.)

I saw on Instagram that @ms._ellaneous was knitting a Ballband Dishcloth.

But hers looked different. I put the phone up to my face to inspect. It was the yarn that was different. It looked a bit thinner, and perhaps crunchier, than my go-to dishcloth yarn of 12+ years, Peaches & Creme.

I inquired.

It turns out Ms. Ellaneous is using Juniper Moon Farm’s Zooey, a cotton/linen blend. Ms. Ellaneous casts on more stitches (57 instead of the classic 45), on size 4 needles. She testifies that this yields a “strong, light dishcloth that dries quickly.”

Well, hell. Why didn’t I think of that? My only—ONLY—complaint about my beloved Ballbands is how slowly they dry. You don’t want a perpetually damp dishrag. All-cotton Ballbands require periodic runs through the “sanitize” cycle, followed by drying to the “very dry” setting, just to get them to smell nice.

I don’t happen to have any Zooey on hand, but I do have a righteous, well-aged stash of single skeins of Louet’s sportweight Euroflax. One hundred percent linen, the greatest stuff ever. I’m going to have to upgrade the go bag.