Basic Crochet Dish Cloth

Hi, I'm Jen Lucas, and I'd like to show you how to crochet a basic dish cloth. If you are new to crochet, you might not be sure where to start, what projects to start with. Well, this is a great one. Even if you're a more experienced crocheter, you might find that this is the perfect quick project that you can give as a gift. It only requires knowing how to chain, work single crochets and double crochets. But you can have this done in no time. So let's learn how to make it. To start, you're gonna need some kitchen cotton and the appropriate sized hook for that kitchen cotton. Here, I have a 3.75 millimeter crochet hook. This particular kitchen cotton is a little bit thinner than some of the other ones that you can find. So I'm using a slightly smaller hook, but just check your ball band to see what hook size is recommended for your yarn. For this particular stitch pattern, you can start by chaining an even number of stitches. So any even number of stitches is gonna work perfectly fine. For these dishcloths, I started with a chain of 32. So if you are using a smaller, thinner yarn, you might go with 32 stitches. If you're using a slightly thicker yarn and a slightly larger crochet hook, you might want to start with a slightly smaller chain, maybe 26, 28 stitches. You can really make this any size you want. You could even make it a dish towel if you wanted to. That's what's so great about this pattern. So first we're gonna start with a slip knot, and we're gonna want to keep this chain pretty loose. I find it's just a little bit easier to work into. So we're gonna start by chaining an even number of stitches. Again, for my pattern, I used 32, but you can chain as many as you want, as long as it's an even number. So I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12. So I have my chain and now I'm gonna work into the back or bottom bump of my chain, because that's just my preference. But you can work into your starting chain however you like. So for this pattern, we're gonna start by working a double crochet into the second chain from the hook. So we have the first chain and then the second chain, and we're gonna just add a double crochet. And then we're going to put a single crochet into the next chain. And we're gonna work that all the way down the row. We're gonna do double crochet, single crochet, and keep repeating that all the way down to the end. We're gonna end the row with a double crochet. So I've worked that final double crochet, and our row one is done. Now row two is gonna be the same. We're just gonna keep repeating row two for the rest of the project. So we're gonna chain one and turn. What we're gonna do now is we're gonna skip that chain one, we're going to skip that double crochet, that last double crochet that we made, and we're going to double crochet into the next stitch. From there, we're just gonna keep repeating the single crochet, double crochet till we get to the end. So we just did a double crochet. Now we're doing a single crochet. Then a double, then a single. So it's a little bit different than other patterns where maybe you're commonly just working one stitch, one type of stitch across the row. We're just alternating between those single and double crochets. So we're gonna single crochet into the last stitch. And then we're actually going to double crochet into that chain that we have, that extra chain we have at the end. So we're just gonna double crochet into there. Chain one and turn. And let's do another row. So we're skipping the chain, we're skipping the double crochet, and we're adding a double crochet into the next stitch. So what we're actually doing is, that double crochet is going into a single crochet. So we're gonna double crochet into the single crochet. And then next step, we're gonna do a single crochet. And so we're gonna do that into the double crochet in the row below. So if you're comfortable reading your crochet fabric, that's one easy way to keep track of what you're doing. The double crochets are going into the single crochets and the single crochets are going into the double crochets. So I'm finishing with the single crochet. And now here's that chain from when I did the chain one on the last row, and I'm gonna double crochet into that. And so you would just keep working that one row until your piece was the size that you wanted it. So you can see here, we already have this cute little swatch here. Could be making a coaster or something like that. But again, if you just start with a larger number of stitches, 32, like I did here, you can have this beautiful dish cloth. And you can see that this particular stitch pattern, it looks really beautiful in a solid yarn, but I also really love those variegated kitchen cottons, and I think that this looks really, really cool. And it just makes me wanna go to the store and buy every color of variegated kitchen cotton and just make a bunch of these. So I hope that you'll give this dish cloth a try. I think you'll really enjoy it.