Friday, May 2, 2014

Pattern Markers

I'm a cat of small attention span and even shorter short term memory. This is the inherent problem with multitasking - I'm doing so many things at any given time that I if I put something down to come back to it later I can't remember what I was doing.

Knitting patterns? Stitch patterns that require extended repeats over multiple rows? DOOM.

So for the two sweaters I have on the needles right now (one human sized, one doll sized) I made stitch pattern markers, decorative little things that help me remember where I am in the pattern, which double as the place marker for the start of the round.



Simple, yeah? The larger one just has decorative bead spacers and is meant to count every 10 rows (the number of rows between increases/decreases in the human sized sweater).

On the smaller one I didn't bother with spacers - it's charting a specific stitch pattern for the cable running up the center of the doll sweater. It's the OXO cable, where the plain rings are just knit as normal and the rings with the beads are the cable crossovers. The blue beads mean I should start with the "hold cable needle to the back" and the purple (fuschia) beads mean I should start with the "hold cable needle to the front". Blue = back, fuschia = front, and the little heart dongle at the end reminds me it's the XO hugs and kisses cable. Even on my least caffeinated and most braindead days I can remember that!

On row 2 of the stockinette between increases
The entire things took me an hour to whip up this morning, using jump rings (5mm and 7mm) and eye pins with assorted beads for the connector bits. Quick, simple, and now I know where I am in my patterns even if the knitting sits around for a month or two unworked.

On the first stockinette row after the first cable cross

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