August 19, 2025 • 25 mins
A dishcloth might not be what you imagine when you think "tool", but I use mine every day. Believe it or not, using a hand-knit one makes a huge difference!
Bias Knit Cotton Dishcloth Pattern
Note: I knit mine to 49 stitches, which is quite a bit smaller than the one in this pattern, but I like the size.
Bias Knit Cotton Dishcloth Pattern
Note: I knit mine to 49 stitches, which is quite a bit smaller than the one in this pattern, but I like the size.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Good morning. Is this am I?
Speaker 2 (00:04):
And today it's the nineteenth, I think, and I am
already on my way to work, but I want to
Since this is Tuesday, we're doing tool of the week.
So my tool of the week is probably not something
people would think of as a tool, but it's something
(00:25):
I use every day, so I think of it as
a tool, and I will put the appropriate links in
the description. But my one of my favorite tools that
I use every day is my hand knitted dish cloths,
or as we say in I or I grew up saying,
(00:47):
dish rags. Mkay, that's what we called 'em, were dish rags. Now,
we didn't have hand knitted ones when I was a kid.
This was something that I discovered later on in life,
and it is the only dish cloth I use.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
There is a huge difference.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
And for a person who actually does all of her
own dishes and does not own a mechanical dish washer,
they are a necessity.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
And so I have a hole drawer full.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
And when I get a hole in water or whatever
and it needs to go, then I chunk it and
I get another one or nit another one. So I
always keep us a good supply. Sometimes I need these
and give them as gifts. I don't remember where I
actually saw them, or if somebody told me about them
or whatever. Anyway, when I bought the house and moved
(01:42):
it and got everything going and discovered I was gonna
need to restore myself, I gave away all of my
and got rid of all of my craft stuff, So
all of my fabric on my yarn, needle keemosowing machines,
(02:02):
of course, but got rid of patterns, you name it.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
I got rid of all of it.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
And the reason I did was because I knew myself
well enough to know that I would be tempted to
sit around and work on some kind of craft as
opposed to working on the house. I'm much more drawn
in that direction. That's my favorite thing to do. But
(02:29):
you know, getting dirty and doing messy stuff and that
kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Is not where I go to first. It's not my
favorite thing.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Sometimes it's necessary, like gardening, you know, that kind of thing.
So I just I gravitate to needlework. I always have anyway.
So the one thing I did keep is I kept
my knitting needles and my cotton yarn.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
You have to make it out of cotton and to it.
They are. I don't know that I can describe how
good they are.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
You have to actually experience one, and you have to
actually use it on a regular basis to understand. You
have to know what it's like to have to wash dishes,
all of the dishes, not just you know, a glass
or something. So this particular pattern, now, I think there's
(03:24):
more than one pattern you can use whatever. I think
you can croche them as well. I've never used to
crocheted one. I like the knitted ones, and one of
the reasons I like them is because there's a stretchy
They are made out of cotton and you knit them
on the diagonals. So they are an excellent beginning knitting pattern.
(03:45):
So if a person wanted to learn to knit, a
knitted dish cloth is probably the best place to start.
In fact, when I was in junior high, yes now
I knew how to knit before this, but I I
was part of UH four H at that point, and
so we had a knitting We did knitting as part
(04:08):
of four H. And so I remember, I want to
say four H meant after school, maybe it was we
were at the school when we did it. That's what
I remember. And So what we knitted at that point
in time, because this was the sixties and this was
a thing is we knitted these little triangular headscarves and
(04:31):
we and you put a you know, string on them
to time under your gin or whatever. Uh, And that
was the thing we did for fashion in the sixties.
So that was a bruce dairy. But it was made
exactly like this dish cloth because it's knitted on the diagonal,
and you increase a stitch in every row, and you
(04:56):
do a couple of dish stitches, and then you do
an are over, and then you knit to the end
of the row, and then the next row you do
the same thing, and so till you get it to
size you want it to be, and then you start
going backwards. So every time on every row when you
first start, you do your knitting too, and then you
(05:17):
do a yarn over, you do knit two together, you
do yarn over, you knit two together, because you need
your row to decrease every every row, but you also
need to keep up your little decorative edge. So what
it makes is it makes a very stretchy because it's
diagonally knitted.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Very stretchy dish cloth.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
So when you get it wet, it gets a lot
bigger than it is wednesdry, and when you're using it
to wash dishes, because you've got the cotton and you
knitted it, so it's kind of nubby, it actually does
a great job of cleaning the dishes. And it is
the only dishcloth I hope I ever have to use.
(06:01):
If I have to use a regular one, I won't
be happy about it. And this may sound like a
really stupid thing. You're thinking, there's a lot of to
do over a dishcloth, but we do our own dishes,
and because we do our own dishes, one of the
most important things we want to have is something to
do our dishes with.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Now you can.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Also make there's patterns for this. I'm trying to think
I've got the yarn, but I don't know if I've
made one or not. You can get the scrubby yarn
that's real kind of prickly, and if you knit or
crochet something, a lot of times people will crochet around
of those and you can use those as a scrubby.
(06:42):
And those are kind of nice too because they're plastic
key and as I said, kind of scratchy. So there
they've got a good texture to them to scrub things
off of the dishes. So my tool of the week
is a knitted dishcloth and I will put the go
find a pattern for it, and you can look all
over at Pinterest or whatever. But it's very simple. It's
(07:06):
a great beginner project. It doesn't you can knit it
up pretty quick. You don't have to be looking at
a pattern. It's not complicated, and it's a good take
and you know, knit on the go kind of pattern
if you have to go sit and wait at something.
So it's a great pattern you just have. The most
important thing is you have to have cotton yarn to
(07:28):
do it, which you can get at Walmart. You can
get it hobby Lobby. I'm sure Michael says it as well.
You have lots of options as far as finding your
ordered on Amazon.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
I've done that too. Generally I can get three.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Dishcloths out of two skeins of the yarn, and so
that works out pretty well. Now you do have a
knot in the middle of one of them, but other
than that, it's not too bad. It'll depend on how
loosely a tightly unit. But the good thing is it's
just a straight knit stitch, you're not doing any pearling
nit and yarn over. Those are the only two things
(08:08):
that you have to know how to do, so it's
very very simple. There's probably even a YouTube online to
show you how to do it, but if I find one,
I'll link it to.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
So it's a great tool. Now.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
In addition to that, that's our tool of the week.
A friend of mine posted something she Ashley, shared it
from somebody else on Facebook the other day and it
really made me think, Now, this fellow who wrote this,
and it was pretty long and he had a lot
of stuff in it, but it made me think, he's
seventy four. Well, I'm sixty five, so I mean he's
sixty nine, So that means I'm only five years behind him.
(08:43):
So it applies to me too, especially since I was
raised by people who were like one generation behind. He
called our generation, because even at five years he would
still be part of the Baby Boomer. He'd be towards
(09:03):
the beginning of the Baby Boomer. I'm right, smack Dad
in the middle of it, he said, we are the bridge.
Our generation is the bridge, and we're the bridge between
the old and the new. And as I was reading
all the things he was talking about. I realized how
very true that is. We are the and now I
(09:25):
think the gen X people think they're the last of
the Mohicans. As far as being raised as being self
sufficient whatever, Well I taught the gen X or so,
I uh, and they are to a certain extent. They
were the generation called the latchkey kids. I don't know
that I hear that term used all the time now,
but they were certainly used back then. But we were
(09:46):
also expected to be pretty self sufficient as well. There
were lots of reasons why we would. We were a
lot more independent than the generations that are now around.
(10:08):
When I see some of the things that I mean, like,
for example, apparently it's a it's like illegal, I think,
for kids to be left alone if they are younger
than thirteen. Well, I was babysitting somebody else's.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Children when I was eleven.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Okay, my parents, my mother might run to town and
leave us at the house by ourselves. My little brother
was three years younger than me. I think the first
time she did that, I was probably at least six.
I mean, I don't think I was old, and she
wasn't gone long. And you know, we were fine when
(10:47):
I had a drive by the time I had a
driver's license at sixteen and seventeen, when Daddy was off
on a job, she would go see him.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
And it was our responsibility.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
I was sixteen, my little brother was thirteen, or you know,
by the time I was a senior, I was seventeen,
he was fourteen. Our responsibility was take care of a
pasture full of cows and horses and various and undred
other things and keep you know, take care of the
place and so and you know, get up.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
And go to school and beyond time.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
So we did all of that, and you wouldn't think
of even beginning to do that at this point in time.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
So there's that.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
So some of the way I was thinking when I
was reading this guy's post, I was thinking of some
of the ways that are considerably different that we've seen
both ends.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
For example, we had a party line.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
If you don't know what a party line is, that
is where multiple people have the same phone line. And
so when you pick up the phone and somebody's talking,
then you know, theoretically you're supposed to put it down
and then wait till they're off, and then you can
make your call, or you can pick it up and
listen to their call, because lots of people did that too,
(12:09):
So you know, obviously you didn't have a lot of
privacy in your phone calls.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
We had that. We had a party line when I
was in high school.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
So that's that's been you know, that was into the seventies.
So that now we carry our phone in our pocket
and not only is it a phone, but it is
a computer and it gives you Doppler radar, and it
tells you what's going on in the news, and you know,
(12:40):
it'll sing you a song.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
You can watch a YouTube learn how to do something.
I mean, we have. The power of the phone we
have is.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Pretty amazing when you stop to think about what we
carry you around with us every day. But everybody has
a phone. They have a phone in their pocket, they
have a phone in their hand. You know, that's the
big and I will say in text right now, that's
the big bruja ha. Because the legislature passed a law
that phones are banned at school. Now, what some schools
(13:08):
are doing is they're allowing kids to keep their phones,
but when they walk in the door of the school,
they have to turn them completely off, power them down,
put them in their backpack and that's where they have
to stay all day. So far, it seems like it's
doing okay. I don't know that anybody's died from it,
(13:32):
but I mean it was definitely a big to do,
and you know, and in some cases, the to do
wasn't the kids, it was the parents having a hissy
that they weren't going to be able to get a
hold of their child in the middle of the day. Well,
my mother didn't never get a hold of me in
the middle of the day, and if I got sick
and needed to go home, I had to go to
the office and use the phone and call her and
(13:55):
tell her. I mean, there was That's just how we
did things back then and survived.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
We're still alive and whatever.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Uh So that's a that's a real change, is how
we how we went from having a a party line
where everybody in the neighborhood was on the same fold line, uh,
to not you know, having one that we carry around
(14:24):
in our purse, our pocket or whatever. And I'm here
at the railroad track and the train is moving, but
at not any kind of fast pace. So let me
see if I can see how long this train is.
And there is no telling because I can't see past
(14:46):
the tree and it might even be.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Gone by.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
I have to go around it at this rate anyway,
because I have presentation this morning. So that's one of
the things that's different when I I One of the
things that really got my attention when I watched the
first time I watched the Apollo thirteen movie is when
(15:16):
Tom Hanks said, Houston, we have a problem.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
They all jumped up and grabbed their slide rule.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
And I we have sent we sent people to the
moon using slide rules.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
That's kind of scary.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Uh. I'm I remember when I was in high school
and I hate chemistry, and this was towards the end.
Uh you know, this was in the seventies, but so
this was towards the end of the slide rule era.
But s you know, lots of mathematics was done over
the years on a slide rule. But our and we
were kind of a nerdy bunch anyway, So the uh,
(15:55):
our chemistry teacher was telling, you know, showing us the
slide rule and this is what all it did and whatever.
We're like, okay, well, we want to learn how to
use that. And so he actually did a night class
and I mean it was full. We had a lot
of people there. As I said, we were a nerdy bunch,
and he taught us. We had night class so we
could learn to use our slide reel, so we all
(16:15):
had a slide reel. We were all excited about it.
One of the things I got at, I want to say,
is a senior and the you know, we didn't call
it pre cal at that point, but I think that's
basically what it was. Calculus was not offered in high
school at that point. It is now obviously, which is
a good thing. We all bought these books. Each one
(16:39):
of us got one that was and I still have
it in my office, mathematical tables, and so I have
this pretty good thing. It's probably about two inches thick
book of mathematical tables. So who knows them? They come
in hand. He's someday, when the you know, world ends,
we don't have a calculator. I was on a zoom
(17:01):
meeting the other day with some people from the state,
and you know, they're obviously all younger than me, and I,
you know, was talking about what is like when I
first started teaching school, because we did not have One
of the biggest things is you were in charge of
what you taught, Okay, you especially in math in high school,
we had I had a textbook and a piece of chalk,
(17:24):
and that's how I taught algebra. And nowadays you know
that that's it's a whole different world, which to and
I'm gonna say is a benefit because now that we
have a lot more hands on teaching for algebra, I
think it makes a lot more sense to kids that
it did before because you actually are seeing, you know,
(17:46):
your hands own algebra is a much better plan. So
I'm not disagreeing with how it's now being taught.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
I'm just saying it's very different. And so you know,
before I said the.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Uh piece of chalk comment, one of the ladies from
the state office said, uh, well, what kind of calculators
did y'all have? And I laughed and I said, we
didn't have a calculator. I had a text book and
a piece of chalk. Okay, there was no There was
no calculator at that point. So that's a big difference
(18:20):
as well. Lots of different things that were different in
that time. For example, this is one of things the
man brought up was the you know, I grew up
in a house that did not have air conditioning. We
did by a window unit. The year we were that,
(18:43):
Daddy was on a job in Eldereta, Arkansas, because he
was they were crossing they were taking this pipeline across
a across the Washingtall River, and it was one of
those really bad years with.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
A big heat wave.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
And it was day after day after day after day
of one hundred plus temperature and we were staying in
this little apartment that was like behind another house, so
there was no breeze. And it's it's considerably even back then,
considerably cooler in the country than it is and in town,
and so there was no way to get any even
(19:17):
a breeze. And so he would come home at the
end of the day and he was so hot in
this little apartment he could not cool off. So what
he would what we did is I want to say,
he got the fourth of July off. So we came
home and my parents went to Sears and bought a
window air conditioner so we could take it with us
back to Arkansas and put it in this little apartment.
(19:42):
So that was our first air conditioner. And I think
at that point in time, when we came home after
the job was over, I think he went in their bedroom,
so the rest of us were still hot.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
Okay, but that's that's just what it was.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
So I grew up without air conditioning, and nowadays we have,
like right now to day, because it's probably gonna be
it's eighty degrees already at before eight o'clock in the morning,
and it's going to be at least one hundred and
it is. We're under a head advisory. And you know,
(20:17):
if things if there's a problem and there's not any electricity,
there's a power outage or whatever, and people can't get
cool or can't get air conditioning. Now they set up
cooling centers for people. That was not a thing. It
was just hot and you were hot with it. It
just was you did the best you could with a
(20:38):
box fan. Mean, that was it. Uh. My niece talks
about canning with her granny, my mother, and you know,
they didn't have air conditioning. They had the stove going
and all that stuff boiling on the stove for the
for canning, and they had a box fan that's you know,
set on the floor and they had all the windows
open and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
So and and see she's even though she's a gen X.
She is.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
Kind of like the bridge too, because nobody that she
knows her age, or even in some cases younger or older,
know anything about canning. They and she, you know, she was,
as I said, attached at the hip with my mother
all summer long.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
And so that's what they did.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
They went to the garden, they picked whatever, they came
back in and they peeled it, they got it ready,
they put it, they canned it. So they she spent
all summer doing that with my mother. And that really,
when I was growing up, was not what we did
because when I guess I was five when my father
got his Welling truck, and from then on we hit
(21:44):
the road every summer and we were gone all summer
with him on a job wherever he was. Now we'd
come home from time to time, but we were usually
gone for several weeks, and then we'd come home and
check on things, and then we'd.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
Go back and do it again.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
So and it wasn't until I was in college that
they hit their back to basic space where they went
back to farming like they were in the depression with
the horse and all that came. We melt a cow
and had chickens and all that kind of stuff. We
did not do that when I was little, but we
did it when my niece was little, so it made
an impression on her. So it this bridge concept is
(22:28):
very much the case. My generation is the last one
to We're the ones that heard the stories of the
Great Depression in World War II firsthand, and I think
that makes a difference, and it is We're the ones
(22:48):
that started out with no technology, but now we can
use technology, so we have, you know, learned over the years.
We can you know, I can go to Chick fil
A and order on the app and pick it up
through the mobile drive through. But then I can also
(23:10):
preserve food and grow it myself. So we have skills
in some cases that are not there for the younger generations,
and now they're having to rediscover them.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
We were all three of.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Us last night laughing about the fact that we all
know how to iron, but people don't iron anymore. I
don't iron much. Every once in a while i'll iron something,
but not very often. I try to pick out things
that don't have to be iron. But my father wore
khaki pants and shirts to you know, to work to well.
(23:45):
Then I think even that's changed at this point. I
think they wear jeans and denim shirts. But back then
it was khakis, and you know, we bottom it wherever
likes or somewhere.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
And when you because the it was that heavy cotton
twelve because it was so stiff when it was first,
you know, when the clothes were new, they were trying to.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Like iron a board or something. It was really interesting.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
But that was one of the very first jobs any
of the three of us, sister, niece and myself. That's
one of the very first jobs we learned how to do,
was to iron because we you know, Daddy's clothes always
had to be ironed.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
He always had to look nice when he went to work.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Now you couldn't see the whites of his eyes when
he came back at the end of the day because
he might be covered mud or whatever else was going
on on the job that day. But when he left,
he looked nice. And so, you know, nobody irons anymore.
I was in a hotel one time. This little guy,
he looked like he's in his twenties, maybe in sales
(24:53):
or something. He found out we were talking about sewing
with the girl at the desk, and and she wanted
to know if we'd learned on YouTube, and we said no.
I said no, my mother taught me how to sew.
But when he found out that that might involve an iron,
he wanted to pay me to iron his shirts, and
I said no, you're on your own, but thanks anyway.
(25:14):
I have arrived at work and have, as I said,
lots to do today, so I'll talk to you tomorrow
Good morning. Is this am I?
Speaker 2 (00:04):
And today it's the nineteenth, I think, and I am
already on my way to work, but I want to
Since this is Tuesday, we're doing tool of the week.
So my tool of the week is probably not something
people would think of as a tool, but it's something
(00:25):
I use every day, so I think of it as
a tool, and I will put the appropriate links in
the description. But my one of my favorite tools that
I use every day is my hand knitted dish cloths,
or as we say in I or I grew up saying,
(00:47):
dish rags. Mkay, that's what we called 'em, were dish rags. Now,
we didn't have hand knitted ones when I was a kid.
This was something that I discovered later on in life,
and it is the only dish cloth I use.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
There is a huge difference.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
And for a person who actually does all of her
own dishes and does not own a mechanical dish washer,
they are a necessity.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
And so I have a hole drawer full.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
And when I get a hole in water or whatever
and it needs to go, then I chunk it and
I get another one or nit another one. So I
always keep us a good supply. Sometimes I need these
and give them as gifts. I don't remember where I
actually saw them, or if somebody told me about them
or whatever. Anyway, when I bought the house and moved
(01:42):
it and got everything going and discovered I was gonna
need to restore myself, I gave away all of my
and got rid of all of my craft stuff, So
all of my fabric on my yarn, needle keemosowing machines,
(02:02):
of course, but got rid of patterns, you name it.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
I got rid of all of it.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
And the reason I did was because I knew myself
well enough to know that I would be tempted to
sit around and work on some kind of craft as
opposed to working on the house. I'm much more drawn
in that direction. That's my favorite thing to do. But
(02:29):
you know, getting dirty and doing messy stuff and that
kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Is not where I go to first. It's not my
favorite thing.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Sometimes it's necessary, like gardening, you know, that kind of thing.
So I just I gravitate to needlework. I always have anyway.
So the one thing I did keep is I kept
my knitting needles and my cotton yarn.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
You have to make it out of cotton and to it.
They are. I don't know that I can describe how
good they are.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
You have to actually experience one, and you have to
actually use it on a regular basis to understand. You
have to know what it's like to have to wash dishes,
all of the dishes, not just you know, a glass
or something. So this particular pattern, now, I think there's
(03:24):
more than one pattern you can use whatever. I think
you can croche them as well. I've never used to
crocheted one. I like the knitted ones, and one of
the reasons I like them is because there's a stretchy
They are made out of cotton and you knit them
on the diagonals. So they are an excellent beginning knitting pattern.
(03:45):
So if a person wanted to learn to knit, a
knitted dish cloth is probably the best place to start.
In fact, when I was in junior high, yes now
I knew how to knit before this, but I I
was part of UH four H at that point, and
so we had a knitting We did knitting as part
(04:08):
of four H. And so I remember, I want to
say four H meant after school, maybe it was we
were at the school when we did it. That's what
I remember. And So what we knitted at that point
in time, because this was the sixties and this was
a thing is we knitted these little triangular headscarves and
(04:31):
we and you put a you know, string on them
to time under your gin or whatever. Uh, And that
was the thing we did for fashion in the sixties.
So that was a bruce dairy. But it was made
exactly like this dish cloth because it's knitted on the diagonal,
and you increase a stitch in every row, and you
(04:56):
do a couple of dish stitches, and then you do
an are over, and then you knit to the end
of the row, and then the next row you do
the same thing, and so till you get it to
size you want it to be, and then you start
going backwards. So every time on every row when you
first start, you do your knitting too, and then you
(05:17):
do a yarn over, you do knit two together, you
do yarn over, you knit two together, because you need
your row to decrease every every row, but you also
need to keep up your little decorative edge. So what
it makes is it makes a very stretchy because it's
diagonally knitted.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Very stretchy dish cloth.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
So when you get it wet, it gets a lot
bigger than it is wednesdry, and when you're using it
to wash dishes, because you've got the cotton and you
knitted it, so it's kind of nubby, it actually does
a great job of cleaning the dishes. And it is
the only dishcloth I hope I ever have to use.
(06:01):
If I have to use a regular one, I won't
be happy about it. And this may sound like a
really stupid thing. You're thinking, there's a lot of to
do over a dishcloth, but we do our own dishes,
and because we do our own dishes, one of the
most important things we want to have is something to
do our dishes with.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Now you can.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Also make there's patterns for this. I'm trying to think
I've got the yarn, but I don't know if I've
made one or not. You can get the scrubby yarn
that's real kind of prickly, and if you knit or
crochet something, a lot of times people will crochet around
of those and you can use those as a scrubby.
(06:42):
And those are kind of nice too because they're plastic
key and as I said, kind of scratchy. So there
they've got a good texture to them to scrub things
off of the dishes. So my tool of the week
is a knitted dishcloth and I will put the go
find a pattern for it, and you can look all
over at Pinterest or whatever. But it's very simple. It's
(07:06):
a great beginner project. It doesn't you can knit it
up pretty quick. You don't have to be looking at
a pattern. It's not complicated, and it's a good take
and you know, knit on the go kind of pattern
if you have to go sit and wait at something.
So it's a great pattern you just have. The most
important thing is you have to have cotton yarn to
(07:28):
do it, which you can get at Walmart. You can
get it hobby Lobby. I'm sure Michael says it as well.
You have lots of options as far as finding your
ordered on Amazon.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
I've done that too. Generally I can get three.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Dishcloths out of two skeins of the yarn, and so
that works out pretty well. Now you do have a
knot in the middle of one of them, but other
than that, it's not too bad. It'll depend on how
loosely a tightly unit. But the good thing is it's
just a straight knit stitch, you're not doing any pearling
nit and yarn over. Those are the only two things
(08:08):
that you have to know how to do, so it's
very very simple. There's probably even a YouTube online to
show you how to do it, but if I find one,
I'll link it to.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
So it's a great tool. Now.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
In addition to that, that's our tool of the week.
A friend of mine posted something she Ashley, shared it
from somebody else on Facebook the other day and it
really made me think, Now, this fellow who wrote this,
and it was pretty long and he had a lot
of stuff in it, but it made me think, he's
seventy four. Well, I'm sixty five, so I mean he's
sixty nine, So that means I'm only five years behind him.
(08:43):
So it applies to me too, especially since I was
raised by people who were like one generation behind. He
called our generation, because even at five years he would
still be part of the Baby Boomer. He'd be towards
(09:03):
the beginning of the Baby Boomer. I'm right, smack Dad
in the middle of it, he said, we are the bridge.
Our generation is the bridge, and we're the bridge between
the old and the new. And as I was reading
all the things he was talking about. I realized how
very true that is. We are the and now I
(09:25):
think the gen X people think they're the last of
the Mohicans. As far as being raised as being self
sufficient whatever, Well I taught the gen X or so,
I uh, and they are to a certain extent. They
were the generation called the latchkey kids. I don't know
that I hear that term used all the time now,
but they were certainly used back then. But we were
(09:46):
also expected to be pretty self sufficient as well. There
were lots of reasons why we would. We were a
lot more independent than the generations that are now around.
(10:08):
When I see some of the things that I mean, like,
for example, apparently it's a it's like illegal, I think,
for kids to be left alone if they are younger
than thirteen. Well, I was babysitting somebody else's.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Children when I was eleven.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Okay, my parents, my mother might run to town and
leave us at the house by ourselves. My little brother
was three years younger than me. I think the first
time she did that, I was probably at least six.
I mean, I don't think I was old, and she
wasn't gone long. And you know, we were fine when
(10:47):
I had a drive by the time I had a
driver's license at sixteen and seventeen, when Daddy was off
on a job, she would go see him.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
And it was our responsibility.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
I was sixteen, my little brother was thirteen, or you know,
by the time I was a senior, I was seventeen,
he was fourteen. Our responsibility was take care of a
pasture full of cows and horses and various and undred
other things and keep you know, take care of the
place and so and you know, get up.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
And go to school and beyond time.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
So we did all of that, and you wouldn't think
of even beginning to do that at this point in time.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
So there's that.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
So some of the way I was thinking when I
was reading this guy's post, I was thinking of some
of the ways that are considerably different that we've seen
both ends.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
For example, we had a party line.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
If you don't know what a party line is, that
is where multiple people have the same phone line. And
so when you pick up the phone and somebody's talking,
then you know, theoretically you're supposed to put it down
and then wait till they're off, and then you can
make your call, or you can pick it up and
listen to their call, because lots of people did that too,
(12:09):
So you know, obviously you didn't have a lot of
privacy in your phone calls.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
We had that. We had a party line when I
was in high school.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
So that's that's been you know, that was into the seventies.
So that now we carry our phone in our pocket
and not only is it a phone, but it is
a computer and it gives you Doppler radar, and it
tells you what's going on in the news, and you know,
(12:40):
it'll sing you a song.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
You can watch a YouTube learn how to do something.
I mean, we have. The power of the phone we
have is.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Pretty amazing when you stop to think about what we
carry you around with us every day. But everybody has
a phone. They have a phone in their pocket, they
have a phone in their hand. You know, that's the
big and I will say in text right now, that's
the big bruja ha. Because the legislature passed a law
that phones are banned at school. Now, what some schools
(13:08):
are doing is they're allowing kids to keep their phones,
but when they walk in the door of the school,
they have to turn them completely off, power them down,
put them in their backpack and that's where they have
to stay all day. So far, it seems like it's
doing okay. I don't know that anybody's died from it,
(13:32):
but I mean it was definitely a big to do,
and you know, and in some cases, the to do
wasn't the kids, it was the parents having a hissy
that they weren't going to be able to get a
hold of their child in the middle of the day. Well,
my mother didn't never get a hold of me in
the middle of the day, and if I got sick
and needed to go home, I had to go to
the office and use the phone and call her and
(13:55):
tell her. I mean, there was That's just how we
did things back then and survived.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
We're still alive and whatever.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Uh So that's a that's a real change, is how
we how we went from having a a party line
where everybody in the neighborhood was on the same fold line, uh,
to not you know, having one that we carry around
(14:24):
in our purse, our pocket or whatever. And I'm here
at the railroad track and the train is moving, but
at not any kind of fast pace. So let me
see if I can see how long this train is.
And there is no telling because I can't see past
(14:46):
the tree and it might even be.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Gone by.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
I have to go around it at this rate anyway,
because I have presentation this morning. So that's one of
the things that's different when I I One of the
things that really got my attention when I watched the
first time I watched the Apollo thirteen movie is when
(15:16):
Tom Hanks said, Houston, we have a problem.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
They all jumped up and grabbed their slide rule.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
And I we have sent we sent people to the
moon using slide rules.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
That's kind of scary.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Uh. I'm I remember when I was in high school
and I hate chemistry, and this was towards the end.
Uh you know, this was in the seventies, but so
this was towards the end of the slide rule era.
But s you know, lots of mathematics was done over
the years on a slide rule. But our and we
were kind of a nerdy bunch anyway, So the uh,
(15:55):
our chemistry teacher was telling, you know, showing us the
slide rule and this is what all it did and whatever.
We're like, okay, well, we want to learn how to
use that. And so he actually did a night class
and I mean it was full. We had a lot
of people there. As I said, we were a nerdy bunch,
and he taught us. We had night class so we
could learn to use our slide reel, so we all
(16:15):
had a slide reel. We were all excited about it.
One of the things I got at, I want to say,
is a senior and the you know, we didn't call
it pre cal at that point, but I think that's
basically what it was. Calculus was not offered in high
school at that point. It is now obviously, which is
a good thing. We all bought these books. Each one
(16:39):
of us got one that was and I still have
it in my office, mathematical tables, and so I have
this pretty good thing. It's probably about two inches thick
book of mathematical tables. So who knows them? They come
in hand. He's someday, when the you know, world ends,
we don't have a calculator. I was on a zoom
(17:01):
meeting the other day with some people from the state,
and you know, they're obviously all younger than me, and I,
you know, was talking about what is like when I
first started teaching school, because we did not have One
of the biggest things is you were in charge of
what you taught, Okay, you especially in math in high school,
we had I had a textbook and a piece of chalk,
(17:24):
and that's how I taught algebra. And nowadays you know
that that's it's a whole different world, which to and
I'm gonna say is a benefit because now that we
have a lot more hands on teaching for algebra, I
think it makes a lot more sense to kids that
it did before because you actually are seeing, you know,
(17:46):
your hands own algebra is a much better plan. So
I'm not disagreeing with how it's now being taught.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
I'm just saying it's very different. And so you know,
before I said the.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Uh piece of chalk comment, one of the ladies from
the state office said, uh, well, what kind of calculators
did y'all have? And I laughed and I said, we
didn't have a calculator. I had a text book and
a piece of chalk. Okay, there was no There was
no calculator at that point. So that's a big difference
(18:20):
as well. Lots of different things that were different in
that time. For example, this is one of things the
man brought up was the you know, I grew up
in a house that did not have air conditioning. We
did by a window unit. The year we were that,
(18:43):
Daddy was on a job in Eldereta, Arkansas, because he
was they were crossing they were taking this pipeline across
a across the Washingtall River, and it was one of
those really bad years with.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
A big heat wave.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
And it was day after day after day after day
of one hundred plus temperature and we were staying in
this little apartment that was like behind another house, so
there was no breeze. And it's it's considerably even back then,
considerably cooler in the country than it is and in town,
and so there was no way to get any even
(19:17):
a breeze. And so he would come home at the
end of the day and he was so hot in
this little apartment he could not cool off. So what
he would what we did is I want to say,
he got the fourth of July off. So we came
home and my parents went to Sears and bought a
window air conditioner so we could take it with us
back to Arkansas and put it in this little apartment.
(19:42):
So that was our first air conditioner. And I think
at that point in time, when we came home after
the job was over, I think he went in their bedroom,
so the rest of us were still hot.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
Okay, but that's that's just what it was.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
So I grew up without air conditioning, and nowadays we have,
like right now to day, because it's probably gonna be
it's eighty degrees already at before eight o'clock in the morning,
and it's going to be at least one hundred and
it is. We're under a head advisory. And you know,
(20:17):
if things if there's a problem and there's not any electricity,
there's a power outage or whatever, and people can't get
cool or can't get air conditioning. Now they set up
cooling centers for people. That was not a thing. It
was just hot and you were hot with it. It
just was you did the best you could with a
(20:38):
box fan. Mean, that was it. Uh. My niece talks
about canning with her granny, my mother, and you know,
they didn't have air conditioning. They had the stove going
and all that stuff boiling on the stove for the
for canning, and they had a box fan that's you know,
set on the floor and they had all the windows
open and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
So and and see she's even though she's a gen X.
She is.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
Kind of like the bridge too, because nobody that she
knows her age, or even in some cases younger or older,
know anything about canning. They and she, you know, she was,
as I said, attached at the hip with my mother
all summer long.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
And so that's what they did.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
They went to the garden, they picked whatever, they came
back in and they peeled it, they got it ready,
they put it, they canned it. So they she spent
all summer doing that with my mother. And that really,
when I was growing up, was not what we did
because when I guess I was five when my father
got his Welling truck, and from then on we hit
(21:44):
the road every summer and we were gone all summer
with him on a job wherever he was. Now we'd
come home from time to time, but we were usually
gone for several weeks, and then we'd come home and
check on things, and then we'd.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
Go back and do it again.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
So and it wasn't until I was in college that
they hit their back to basic space where they went
back to farming like they were in the depression with
the horse and all that came. We melt a cow
and had chickens and all that kind of stuff. We
did not do that when I was little, but we
did it when my niece was little, so it made
an impression on her. So it this bridge concept is
(22:28):
very much the case. My generation is the last one
to We're the ones that heard the stories of the
Great Depression in World War II firsthand, and I think
that makes a difference, and it is We're the ones
(22:48):
that started out with no technology, but now we can
use technology, so we have, you know, learned over the years.
We can you know, I can go to Chick fil
A and order on the app and pick it up
through the mobile drive through. But then I can also
(23:10):
preserve food and grow it myself. So we have skills
in some cases that are not there for the younger generations,
and now they're having to rediscover them.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
We were all three of.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Us last night laughing about the fact that we all
know how to iron, but people don't iron anymore. I
don't iron much. Every once in a while i'll iron something,
but not very often. I try to pick out things
that don't have to be iron. But my father wore
khaki pants and shirts to you know, to work to well.
(23:45):
Then I think even that's changed at this point. I
think they wear jeans and denim shirts. But back then
it was khakis, and you know, we bottom it wherever
likes or somewhere.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
And when you because the it was that heavy cotton
twelve because it was so stiff when it was first,
you know, when the clothes were new, they were trying to.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Like iron a board or something. It was really interesting.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
But that was one of the very first jobs any
of the three of us, sister, niece and myself. That's
one of the very first jobs we learned how to do,
was to iron because we you know, Daddy's clothes always
had to be ironed.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
He always had to look nice when he went to work.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Now you couldn't see the whites of his eyes when
he came back at the end of the day because
he might be covered mud or whatever else was going
on on the job that day. But when he left,
he looked nice. And so, you know, nobody irons anymore.
I was in a hotel one time. This little guy,
he looked like he's in his twenties, maybe in sales
(24:53):
or something. He found out we were talking about sewing
with the girl at the desk, and and she wanted
to know if we'd learned on YouTube, and we said no.
I said no, my mother taught me how to sew.
But when he found out that that might involve an iron,
he wanted to pay me to iron his shirts, and
I said no, you're on your own, but thanks anyway.
(25:14):
I have arrived at work and have, as I said,
lots to do today, so I'll talk to you tomorrow
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