Monthly Archives: January 2010

First Love

My original motivation for having a blog was to talk about my adventures in knitting and crocheting. I was just starting to knit dishcloths. since i wasn't working outside the home, I relied on patterns from library books and books from my own collection. I learned very quickly that the internet is a very rich source of free patterns for all manner of dish and wash cloths. Rather than saving all the links in the Bookmark folder of my browser, I decided to list them on a side bar of my blog. Little did I know, how many were and are available. After a very short time my list had grown to the extent that it seemed most practical to devote an entire blog to this topic. Thus was born Dish and Wash Cloth Mania.

What started as a very small blog, has grown over the years to  have more than forty pages and more links than I can imagine. I continue to be fascinated not only making dish and wash cloths, but by searching for them on the internet. 

There are some amazingly creative designers and artists who share the
fruit of their love and labor with the rest of the world by turning
their patterns into dish or wash cloths, They are all beautiful! Due to piracy  and copyright issues, some designers have begun making
free patterns available only through Ravelry. I respect this.

Over the years, web hosts have gone out of business; designers have died or moved on to other activities; and others have quit offering free patterns in favor of selling them.In spite of these things the availability of free patterns remains astounding.

If you never tried making one, please do so. You might find you like them.

Promises to Myself

I have thought a lot about making New Year's Resolutions again this year. Because the truth for me is that they normally get broken very quickly, I have decided against making any. Instead, my choice is to make some promises to myself. On the surface, it might not seem like there is much difference in the two. For me there is a huge one. A promise is a firm decision that must be kept. A resolution is not nearly as strong.

Here are a couple of promises I have made to myself, listed in no particular order:

  • I will work on losing weight and improving my over all fitness on a daily basis. I do not  want to  end this decade of my life  overweight and out of shape. One of my Grandmothers died a miserable death of heart failure and and I am going to do everything in power to avoid the same fate. 
  • I will use the contents of at least one of the four 19 quart containers of yarn in my stash. These containers and others have  yarn from Grab Bags purchased from Pisgah Yarn and Dyeing Co. in the past couple of years. There are already some specific plans for it.
  • I will try some of the patterns from a variety of sources that I have been saying for years that I will try. This is the year to do so.
  • I will finish the partially completed baby blanket that has been waiting to be done for months.
  • The gift for the grand daughter of a friend of mine will be finished and delivered.
  • My dishcloth blog: Dish and Wash Cloth Mania will have much more time devoted to it than it has had for a very long item. It has been ignored all too often in the past two years. From now on things will be different.
  • I am going to try very hard to blog here at least once a week. One of my goals is to be more creative in how this is done. This is a work in progress.

There are lots of things I want to do and write about this year. I am not making any promises about them. We will have to see how life works out.

May each of you have a Blessed New Year!