Crochet Dish Scrubbie

 I saw this pattern for a dish scrubby by Mrs.Greene, and I thought, hmmm I wonder how well something like that would work.

This scrubby uses mesh bags, like those onions are packaged in.  You cut the bag into strips and loop them together.  The mesh "yarn" is crocheted along with a traditional yarn carrier thread onto a crocheted base, for structure.  You are going to be scrubbing dishes with this after all, you don't want it to be flimsy!

I chose Lily Sugar'n Cream Strawberry scents as the base yarn.  It wasn't to make the dishes smell nice, or prevent the sponge from stinking, but because I had a small amount of it left from making the mug cozy for Blockette.

Because I wanted some contrast, I used Sugar'n cream Playtime as the carrier thread to go along with the mesh bag plarn.  What a pain to crochet with.  The Plarn was so stiff, and the edges were prickly and pokey.  They did not want to play nice at all.  (I may have said a bad word or twelve at the uncooperative plarn.  Good thing I was home alone and the kitties were asleepin')

I stitched the base with a G hook, but I had to go up to H hook to crochet with the plarn.  I had to fight a lot less with the plarn with the larger hook.

The tip about laying the scrubby flat was very helpful.  Holding the worked crocheting vertical like I normally do was not working at all.  The plarn stitching was weird and distorted.  As soon as I ripped that nasty looking stuff out and started crocheting with my base laying on the counter, things started to look right and proper.

The cloth warped quite a bit so the scrubbie looked more like a rhomboid than a rectangle.  I'm not too worried about it as it is only going to be used to clean dishes and not the Queen of England.

What I like about this scrubby is that you wind up with a super scrubby side:

AND a light scrubby side:

Because sometimes the dishes don't need a heavy duty scrub.

So how does it work for actually cleaning the dishes?
 Not too bad.  I'd say it works as well as that blue sponge you see sitting on the sink in the above pictures, with the added benefit of being able to toss it in the washing machine when it gets stinky.  Yeah I know that you can nuke a sponge to get rid of the smell, but there are only so many times you can do that before the sponge is so gross microwaving it no longer works.

We'll see how long this dish scrubby lasts in comparison to a sponge before it falls apart.