Dish Scrubbers – A Quick and Easy Eco Friendly Craft

Yay! I’m finally getting a crafting post up! I’ve been meaning to write about these dish scrubbers for a while now, and today is the day! These homemade dish scrubber pads are one of my favorite eco-friendly crafts! They’re quick and easy to make, cut down on waste, and they’re better than dish sponges.

Yarn Based Dish Scrubbers are the Best!

I’ve been making dish scrubbers for a few years now and I love them! They are a great way to use up yarn remnants as well as being very durable and reusable. In fact, some of the scrubby pads in the picture below have been in use for over five years now, and they’re still in great condition.

I also like them for sanitation reasons too. I’ve made a bunch of them so I can use a fresh scrubber every day. They are machine washable so you just throw them in with a towel load to wash them. Better yet, no more sponges or plastic dish scrubbers going in the trash! They’re a great craft to help with starting a plastic-free lifestyle.

I’ve had to rethink my yarn choices for the dish scrubbers

I’ve always made these scrubbers using the Red Heart scrubby yarn. What I like about the yarn is that it is a great for scrubbing off stuck-on food and is very durable. The problem is that the scrubby yarn is made with polyester.

Polyester is a synthetic petroleum-based material classified as a plastic. It is also one of the major contributors to microfiber pollution. For those of you who read my blog, you know it’s my goal to reduce plastic waste.

So this puts me in a conundrum because I love these scrubber pads 🙁 So, I started looking for a natural fiber alternatives to the polyester. So far, I’ve found the 100% cotton Scrub Off yarn by Lily Sugar’n Cream and the Scrub-Ology by Yarn Bee. After trying them out, I’ve found that the Scrub Off yarn is too soft and better suited for something like a wash cloth. The Scrub-Ology yarn, which is also 100% cotton, is a bit rougher and so far has been a better replacement for the Scrubby yarn.

Going Plastic-Free comes with a lot of decisions

This project brings up another issue I keep running into, especially now that I’m trying to be more intentional about the products I use. What do I do with the plastics that are already in my possession? Let’s take the scrubber pads for example, does the fact that they are a polyester negate the good they have done – and are doing? Because even though they are polyester they have lasted me over 5 years (and still going strong). That’s 5 years I haven’t needed a disposable dish sponge or scrubber.

About the Dish Scrubbers Pattern

Back to the pattern. As stated, my previous scrubbers were made using polyester-based scrubby yarn. I can attest to their cleaning ability and durability since I’m still using those scrubbers 5 years later with no major signs of wear. I plan to keep using these pads, but from now on I will make future dish scrubbers with natural fiber yarns. The pattern below uses the 100% cotton yarn Scrub-Ology that I just started using. They clean as well as the other scrubbers but it will take about a year to tell how well they hold up.

I’m a knitter (nothing against crochet, I just don’t know it) so this is a knit pattern. But you can easily find crochet patterns, along with other knit scrubber patterns, on Yarnspirations and Ravelry.