A family of 5 can go through a lot of glasses in a day. You know how it goes, you get a glass of water and you don't finish drinking it but when you go looking for it suddenly there are three partially empty glasses and you can't figure out which one has your germs on it and which one is covered with sister kooties. So you get another clean glass out and start again. Take this times 5 and we have a full dishwasher before we get to dinner! It is extra work for the person on dish duty but it also uses more water and soap. So here is my creative solution. Individual glass cozy's. I made a bunch of them in different colored yarns, I used Peaches and Cream Cotton so that I could wash them in hot water with our cloth napkins. Everybody that takes a glass needs to put a cozy on it and use it for the entire day.
Most of us have our favorites that we use all the time, I like the yellow and my daughter likes the pink-orange-yellow, I made the black one for the 15 year old teenager who is in his black phase. Hubby wanted me to make him a dirt colored one because his hands are always dirty from gardening when he comes in for a drink and he didn't want to keep getting his cozy muddy. I haven't found that color yarn yet.
Here are the instructions for cozys that fit the french tumbler glasses that we have, the same size works on the 8oz, 12oz and the 17 oz glasses. They are knit in the round on double points or circulars.
with size 8 needles cast on 36 stitches
join without twisting
knit 5 rounds
round 6: k2tog, k to end of round
knit 5 rounds
round 12: k2tog, k to end of round
knit 5 rounds
round 18: k2tog, knit to end of round
knit 2 rounds
cast off, weave in ends
after washing they soften and grip the glasses quite well
I wish I could tell you that we only wash 5 glasses a day now; we don't. But we are using significantly fewer glasses a day, and I think it has raised awareness in the house about how easy it is to be careless with resources.
I then knit a cover for the ubiquitous can of Barkeepers Friend that sits by our sink. Hubby laughed and wondered if I was going to cover everything in the house with knitted tubes! Tell me would you rather look at this:
or this?
If they aren't going to put things away, my theory is to make stuff that is out as attractive as possible. That is why I have always used wicker laundry baskets. I knew that there would always be laundry out on any given day in some stage of being sorted or folded or transported. I like looking at wicker baskets way better than those plastic baskets! And surprisingly my wicker baskets have lasted almost 20 years!If you can't control the clutter at least make it tolerable.
4 comments:
Hello! I wandered over here to visit and I read your post on Murphy's law- everything that can break-will. What a couple of weeks you had!!! Hopefully everything else is holding together, we shall not talk about it in case of jinx!
I like the glass holders, we have six people guzzling here and yes, I am very well acquainted with glass over load!
That is bloody brilliant! I have markers for my wine glasses and they're terrific, but it never occurred to me that I could do the same for the glasses. Maybe my seven-year-old could be persuaded to use a glass more than once if he could be sure that no one else had lipped it while he wasn't looking!
Bingo! So THAT's how we can keep track of whose glass is whose around here. Thanks a million.
Love everything about this project. I have always wanted to do something with left over yarn. Now when my dirty dishes are sitting on the counter they will look pretty. Thanks for the detail instructions.
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