Grab your knitting needles and come relax with me.
Friday, March 13, 2009
How to Use Stitch Markers Part 2
This is the continuation of our series on how to use stitch markers. Like I have said in the past, we have found that there are a lot of searches coming to our site using this term. So we decided that I would put out a little series on how to use them. In the first post we included some descriptions of the different kinds of stitch markers, you can find that post here: How to Use Stitch Markers.
Let's begin with lace stitch markers. These are usually very small, many people use jump rings, rubber bands, some us a bit of scratch yarn tied in a loop. We happen to sell some made with wire and glass beads in our shop. These are very small with little or no weight to them. This is because in a lace project you may need to use quite a few of them, and you don't want the project to get too heavy. Also these should not have any dangles coming off them. With fine lace if you have dangles they are likely to get tangled up in your lace, which will not be fun to remove.
OK now how to use them! Well there are many thoughts and process that people use to determine where they put their markers, so this will be mostly up to you, but here are a few of the main ideas. With lace markers it is especially useful to mark where the lace repeats itself, for instance if you are in a pattern that includes a small repeat then you would like to mark the beginning of each repeat. With lace projects they often repeat themselves over and over again, and until you have the pattern down pat, you may not remember where each one begins and ends. This will be your little reminder.
Also when you change your pattern, you will want to put a marker down to notify you of the change of pattern. For instance where an edging begins, this would be ideal for a different color or size marker to distinguish the change. In our Lace Stitch Markers, you can order in different colors for the jewel (as we call them) this could help with the pattern changes.
Another great time to use them is in the middle of a large pattern to mark something special. If you are free style knitting this can be helpful. Birdy once was knitting a randomized scarf where she would just randomly place a little mini cable, or a bead or a weird little pattern switch. This was a great place for her to use them to remind here of where she wanted to do this.
Lastly with the lace markers, if you are knitting some lacy thing in the round, you will definitely want at least on to mark the beginning of the round. This is very helpful since if you miss this you may not be knitting the correct row in your pattern. This again is useful for a differing color, or style. Using a Dual Use Stitch Marker would be a good idea for the row marker here.
Special note: In all these cases the stitch markers were uses on the needles between stitches not on the yarn itself.
If you have some ways that you like to use stitch markers in your lace projects, please include them in the comments section. I will be talking about more ways to use the other markers shortly, as well as ways to make your Dual Use Stitch Markers work for you in more than two ways!
