What I learned from Crocheting a Dish Scrubbie

This week in my 2016 quest to learn to crochet, I made myself a couple of dish scrubbies.

I've been browsing my Crochet Pinterest Board to find things to make and settled on this pattern on Ravelry for a spiral scrubbie.

The pattern looked fairly straightforward, and there was also a Youtube video of the tutorial which I watched as well.

You basically crochet a diamond shape and then stitch it together to form the spiral scrubbie.

My first attempt went a little wonky.

It took me a while to 'understand' what I was doing with the pattern.

In the end it was a very straightforward - increase the row by 2 stitches on one end, and decrease by 2 on the other end.

It's all worked in single crochet.

I learned that it can be very important where you put your crochet hook in the stitches. For this scrubbie - you have to crochet in the back loop to create ridges in the crochet - just what you need for a scrubbie!!

So I learned what the 'back loop' is 

(working this crochet from right to left)

So here's my first finished scrubbie. Despite being a little wonky, once stitched it seems to look OK.

I had to make another one straight away to try and get it more even, and reinforce what I'd just learned.

This one turned out much better - although I had fewer stitches in each row at the end than I started with. Not sure how I managed that...

Stitching it together is very straightforward - you fold the corners over to make a tube, stitch that, then weave around both edges of the tube and pull tight to create the round scrubbie.  I also added a chain stitch loop on this second one as mentioned on the PDF version of the pattern, so I can hang this one up!

So there you have my two crochet dish scrubbies.

I timed myself making the second one and all up it took 45 minutes. 

(I was just curious as to the time)

I'm very pleased with this week's crochet creations and am looking forward to using them and seeing how effective they are at cleaning my dishes! Maybe I can persuade my girls to be the official 'scrubbie testers'  They might think washing dishes is more interesting with pretty coloured scrubbies to use!

I haven't yet decided what to try making next week - any suggestions welcome as always!