Knitted dish cloths and plastic bowls

[vilakins]

I wonder if some Americans can enlighten me. I'm puzzled by how many of you knit dish cloths--and give them away as gifts. There are lots of patterns around for them, many of them wonderfully geekish, but please tell me why they're so popular and how you use them?

Are they used for washing dishes in a sink? For drying them? I can't imagine wool or acrylic working well in either case. And are wash cloths another sort, or used for the face?

Here are two popular patterns.
Here's one pattern.
And a Dalek one

And this is what finally sparked this query.


This is for people from the UK. Why do you wash dishes in a plastic bowl in the sink rather than directly in the sink? Is it to save water, to keep the sink clean, to be able to toss debris over the side, to protect dishes from hard metal, or for some other reason?

Just so people know my dish-washing habits, I rinse dishes to get loose food off and put them in the dishwasher. I wash delicate glassware (only used for dinner parties or special occasions) in the sink with a microfibre cloth, and pots and pans with a brush which goes through the dishwasher when it needs it. I dry any hand-washed dishes with a tea towel, and no, I don't know why it's called that. "Dish towel", as cited by an American, makes more sense.

The only reason I'm asking about dish washing is because of seeing so many knitted dish cloths on a knitting site. It's not normally a subject that exerts any fascination.

Comments

[entropy-house.livejournal.com]

With my mom, you weren't allowed to run the dishwasher or take out the kitchen trash until they were FULL, because otherwise you wasted water/soap/trash bags. Not really a good way to save money.

Some people don't realize that appliances do require maintenance, and regular cleaning.

One of my brothers invited me & my father to visit him at his first apartment. He'd been there over a year. He warned us that the clothes drier was very weak- he'd have to dry clothes for hours and hours. I asked him when he'd last cleaned the lint filter.

'Lint filter?' says he. 'No, it hasn't got one.'

Uhuh. I located the door, pulled it out and it had a 3 inch thick mat of felted lint. A year's worth of drying... :^)

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Aaaaugh! He was lucky the lint didn't get hot and burn! That happened to a friend here--and she used to clean hers out regularly. I do mine a lot, esp if I just dried something linty like towels.

[entropy-house.livejournal.com]

Yep, I told him just that- he was lucky he didn't burn the place down. I make it a habit to pull mine out & clean it if needed before *and* after each load, on the principle that if I let myself not do it once, I'll never remember. :^)

And every once in a while I take it into the kitchen and wash it with dishwasher detergent, because laundry chemicals build up and clog the mesh.