In my efforts to help out the environment by replacing as many disposible items with reusable items as is practical, I've been on a quest to find good reusable dish sponge.
I've been using these for a while. The scrubby side is made from a plastic fabric with raised white plastic dots.
I've been using these for a while. The scrubby side is made from a plastic fabric with raised white plastic dots.
The back is terry cloth, fiber content unknown.
These can be washed in the washing machine, but as you can see above, the plastic fabric splits and has to be mended. Also, the plastic foam sponge inside does break down over time and eventually these need to be thrown out, adding more plastic to the landfill. Also, the white dots fall off in the washing machine or while I'm doing the dishes, sending microplastics into the water system. Altogether, these are not an ideal solution.
Thinking about this recently, I realized that the scrubby side doesn't actually do that good a job of scrubbing. I've essentially been washing my dishes with cloth. And, since I'm good about rinsing my dishes right away and setting them to soak in soapy water, I don't actually need to scrub them. So, I decided to try my hand at creating my own dish sponges out of some sort of fabric.
Using one of my existing dish sponges as a guide for size, I crocheted a rectangle that when folded up would be the desired thickness, folded it in thirds, and then crocheted the edges together.
The first sponge in that image demonstrates why one should always make a gauge swatch: even though my foundation chain was the same length as the old dish sponge, by the time I got through crocheting my rectangle it had grown quite a bit! I used the oversized sponge as my gauge swatch, adjusted my stitch and row counts, and made 3 more sponges, this time the right size. I used hdcs to make the rectangle because they work up fast and make a nice pattern on their own.
I just used one of these to do the dishes, and it did the job just fine. There was even an unexpected advantage: it was much easier to rinse the soap out and wring out the sponge than with the old model.
As a final note, I can never wring out my dish sponge without thinking about this episode of Frasier:
