How to Make a Simple Garter Stitch Dish Rag

Making dishrags or washcloths is fun, easy and addictive. Here is the most basic garter stitch washcloth, often referred to as Granny's Favorite or a Granny Washcloth.

What you will need:

• Any yarn of your choice. Worsted weight cotton such as Peaches and Creme is common.
• A set of knitting needles appropriate to the yarn you've chosen. Either straights or circulars work equally well. Worsted weight is generally marked as a U.S. size 8 (5 mm) needle. Go down a size or two if you knit loosely. Go up a size if you knit tightly. Don't worry too much about gauge. These washcloths are very forgiving.
• A needle for darning in the ends

Let's begin.
Cast on 3 stitches.
Row 1: Knit 1, Make 1, Knit to end.
Repeat row 1 until you have an equilateral triangle that is half the size you want your finished cloth to be. From here on you will knit every row as follows until you have 3 stitches left:
Knit 1, K2tog, Knit to end of row.
Bind off the last three stitches, weave in tails and you are done!

A Knitter Goes Postal

What happens when a knitter gets pissed off from all of the stupid, fear-mongering tactics being bandied about with the health care debate? She gets all sensible and shit. That's what.

I first read this on Ravelry while there were discussions about the health care debate going on in the United States. It's a long piece, but a good read. The author gave her permission to forward far and wide, so feel free to share if you agree with what she has to say.


Walker Texas Ranger and Health Care Reform: A music journalist’s non-expert take on the whole HCR debate bruhaha.

Like just about every other citizen of our fine nation, I’ve been paying attention to the health care reform debate and hearing arguments from both sides. Most recently, my mother has been sending me emails forwarded from Newt Gingrich and Chuck Norris. For some of us on the Left end of the political spectrum, merely the sources of these missives are enough to discount the contents. However for others, like my mother, a point-by-point refuting is more necessary. So for those individuals like my mother, I will deal bit by bit with some of the ‘facts’ at hand.

In one email, noted spin-master Newt Gingrich said that this government is completely incompetent when it comes to handling money using Cash for Clunkers as an example. I will give Newt this – it is documented fact that Cash for Clunkers was far more popular than anyone thought it would be and it ran out of money months ahead of schedule. You could take this to mean, as he asserts, that the CARS program was thus a colossal failure but before you do consider that all of the clunkers traded in equated to new vehicles bought and new car lots sitting empty of inventory creating a need to make more cars thus a call-back of THOUSANDS of previously laid-off auto workers. Tragic failure? I think not.

In another email Chuck Norris exposes one of the ‘Dirty Little Secrets of the Obamacare’. He expresses concern that language in the bill would allow ‘government agents’ to come into your house, (will they be wearing black suits and dark glasses?) usurp your parental authority, indoctrinate your children, and perhaps even encourage pregnant women to have abortions! He is right that there is a provision in one version of the bill to expand funding to existing programs that provide low-income families with in-home prenatal and parenting support. However, if you look up the provision in the bill to which Walker Texas Ranger is referring there is absolutely no language – not one teensy hint – that anyone will urge anyone else have an abortion as he suggests. In fact, any government employee or contractor is expressly forbidden even to mention such a thing under the Hyde Ammendment of 1977.

I knew a woman once who thought it was just fine to put Mountain Dew in her baby’s bottle when the child was four months old. Is it a bad idea for someone to step in and tell her otherwise? These agencies come in at the parents’ request (or sometimes on the recommendation of teachers or doctors if a problem is noticed) and make sure at-risk children are hitting their developmental milestones. You think the Mountain Dew Mom would know if her child weren’t developmentally on par with other children his age? If he has developmental issues do you think she should be encouraged to accept the support services offered or that the government should just stay out of her life while she continues to neglect her child?

Norris is correct that this portion of the bill is targeted at low-income families. You could accept, as does Mr. Kung-fu-fighting, that this is deliberate profiling and unfair stereotyping. But before you do consider that many low-income parents are also poorly educated. A lack of education could lead to the kind of parents who might not know the full spectrum of consequences drinking or smoking during pregnancy may cause or the importance of proper prenatal care. Should they not be offered the opportunity to work with a health care professional to help them out on the finer points of fetal health?

In a different email from Mr. Gingrich, Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel’s name came up as being a ‘Dr. Death’ type who advocates the rationing of services to people near the end of life. The fact of the matter is quite contrary to this charge. Dr. Emmanuel is a well respected professional who has been working for years on improving quality of life for patients near the end of life and has long been an opponent of euthanasia and assisted suicide. What he said that has been taken out of context could be simplified as meaning that sometimes the best course of action is not the most aggressive, regardless of expense. This is a quality of life issue – not an espousing of care-rationing. Imagine you’ve got an 80 year old patient with cancer. Do you think that aggressive radiation and chemotherapy is going to do a whole lot to improve the quality of life for this already frail individual – months of nausea and weakness and other painful side effects in order to prolong existence for a matter of months – or do you think that maybe pain management might be the most humane course of treatment?

The quotes and statistical facts that Gingrich uses do indeed appear to be legitimate and well documented, but just because something ‘looks’ well documented doesn’t mean that it is factually correct. Many of the things claimed and quoted in those emails were things that I didn’t know much about so I went and looked up the quotes and read them in context. I support health care reform because I’ve read into the various versions of the bill – in context – and asked questions of actual experts like doctors who deal with these issues daily. I’ve also researched the information supporting the need for health care reform.

In my research I immediately discount any partisan information source from either side. I’ve been looking up statistics from neutral sources such as the UN, World Health Organization, CDC, National Census, etc. Here are a few facts I gleaned from these impartial sources: We pay twice the amount per capita on health care than the next country in line which is Switzerland. (About $8000 per head v. about $4000 per head.) At the same time we rank 29th in the world for infant mortality and 41st for total life expectancy. The cost of health care is rising at a rate roughly commensurate with that of insurance company profits. Not only is the actual cost of health care going up – as in what the doctor’s bill actually costs – premiums and deductibles are going up. Debt from health care is the number one reason cited for bankruptcy. And most of those going bankrupt are insured. The number of uninsured is also rising – something like 12 million over the past ten years. And while it is true that an ER cannot deny treatment to someone in crisis, that doesn’t include routine care or follow up. People are denied that daily – which often causes the crisis situations that spark the ER visits that don’t get paid for and end up being passed on to the actual paying consumers.

As for the ‘lack of efficiency and total failure of government health care programs’ that Gingrich asserts, consumer satisfaction surveys show that recipients of government health care programs like Medicare and Tricare are far happier than those covered under private insurance. The military medical system is one of the most efficient and best in the world because they don’t adhere to any artificial construct of cost-per-service. The army owns the x-ray machine and the facility. The army pays the x-ray tech a flat salary. The overhead for maintenance of the radiology department is the same whether they see 5 patients in one day or 50. They pay their doctors a flat salary whether they are active-duty soldiers or civilians employed by the Department of Defense. There is no calculated cost-per-visit to see patients – they work X hours a day X days a year regardless of how many patients they see or how many tests they order. The military buys such a massive quantity of drugs that they are able to negotiate costs down with the drug companies for common and generic drugs. (Walmart is able to do the same thing which is why they are able to offer something like 500 prescriptions for $4 each.)

This system is very similar to some of the much-feared socialized medical systems of Europe and in my opinion the best option for our country. There is a minority of far-left liberals in the House and Senate that share this point of view. However, this is seen as far too radical and expensive for just about everyone else so they’ve introduced this idea of a ‘public option’ which basically works like expanded Medicare. People who do not have insurance or who do not like the insurance they have would be able to buy in to a not-for-profit government-run insurance program. Mind you BUY INTO – not get for free. (Though there is a provision to allow low income citizens a graduated pay scale – up to people making four times the poverty level which is about $12,000/person/year, but they’d still be required to pay deductibles and co-pays like any other insurance.) If people do like their insurance, they are welcome to – encouraged to – keep it. Insurance companies might lose some business. Watch me not cry for them when they’re already making record profits and their CEO’s are making salaries in the BILLIONS. Maybe if they’d treated their customers right in the first place they wouldn’t be losing them. Hopefully, the fear of losing customers to this public option will prompt them to start. One of the goals of a public option is to provide competition so that the private companies start providing adequate services.

This isn’t a hostile government takeover of health care. This isn’t a plot to kill grandma or mandate abortion or provide coverage for illegal aliens or force the entire population to get microchipped as a precursor of the mark of the beast. Any argument to that end is nothing more than an insurance industry lead campaign of deliberate lying and scare tactics in order to cause mass hysteria and thus opposition to a bill that stands to reduce the profits of those same companies to levels that are only moderately obscene. However I have heard very few arguments that are NOT based on lies and fear-mongering. You’d think that if this bill was so bad someone, somewhere would be able to come up with a legitimate, logical, and reasonable argument against. Perhaps it is because there are no such arguments strong enough to garner enough public outrage to defeat a bill that would so obviously be in their best interests.

Both sides are behaving badly at these town hall meetings. It started out with the opposition and their hysterical screaming and continued with the proponents organizing to scream back and scream louder. That isn’t the way to have a national conversation and the whole thing makes me very mad, especially since all the screaming results in a complete and total lack of actual discussion on what are very serious issues that are in desperate need of being handled. Perhaps I too am hostile. I admit that I am angry. I will gladly live with that charge. I do not like it when people in power use lies and fear to manipulate the people that they have power over in order to continue to take advantage of them.

(This piece should be showing up in the writer's local paper soon. If I hear of the address I will link to it.)

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Granny Washcloth

How to Make a Hat - any gauge, any yarn