Knit Dust Rags

So this is a practice run of stockinette stitch. It’s probably suitable for a beginner knitter. I’m not going to put in a tutorial here of how to knit or purl, cast on or bind off, or overhand-knot and weave in yarn ends, because you can find all those in various places online, but if you can do those five or six techniques you can make this. Here’s why you’d want to. This is relatively smooth 100% acrylic yarn. I made this thing in about a week of work for a few hours at a time. I hated every minute of it because I despise knitting but figured stockinette stitch is a nice knit so I may as well see what it does. Turns out it was worth it. You know how microfiber cloths are touted as like, this great cleaning thing that picks up dust and dirt really well, but you can’t toss them into the laundry machine with everything else? This dusts really well, without additional water. And you can toss it into the laundry machine with everything else. It will shrink, however. Here’s the pattern, in plain English:
Use bamboo knitting needles that are 8 mm wide, or bamboo chopsticks that are round (I think they’re usually that same diameter, at least they seem that way in the United States)
Use 4 medium 100% acrylic yarn, which is handy since that’s the most common kind
Cast on 20 stitches
Knit 20 stitches
Purl 20 stitches, then alternate knitting and purling until you can fold it over diagonally and it’s roughly square because the sides are pretty much equal to one another. It’s about 30 rows total, not including the cast-on and bind-off bits.
Bind off.
Use a yarn needle to use overhand knots to tie the last bits of yarn on there then weave in the ends.

Update 8/16/24: Forgot to mention that this works really well to dust off crystals and rock collections. It would probably work great to dust off fiddly stuff like that too, but probably not like, silk flowers and plants unless you have time to burn

Update 12/4/24: This also works pretty well to dust electronics like laptops and cell phones, nooks and crannies of larger objects, windowsills, desk surfaces, and I’m gonna experiment with it some more. It could also in theory work pretty well to dust cars on the interior

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