Knitting & Crochet Blog Week: Day 6 A Tool to Covet #4KCBWDAY6

A Tool to Covet

This has to be a “stitch marker”! 

Have you ever been told off by a ten-year-old waving a stitch marker in your face?

I have.

Ms 10 struts into the room and confronts me with hands on hips and a disapproving frown. Waving a stitch marker in my face she scolds, “Mummy. Look at this. Do you know what this is? This is one of your stitch markers! I can tell where you have been by the trail of stitch markers all over the place! You must learn to look after your things.”

What can I say? I am guilty.

My saddest admission is from being out and about, crocheting in public as usual.  I lost my stitch marker. Two days later there it was still sitting in a very busy public place, despite all the foot traffic! I am thinking of having personalised stitch markers made; like geocaching where those initiated leave secret boxes and clues in public places, my stitch markers will be a signal, a secret code to indicate that “Jodie was here”.

Seriously, they are so very useful, not just for preventing the unravelling of a work-in-progress (WIP).

• They mark the place where a regular increase or decrease might occur.
• They divide long rows of stitches into manageable easy-to-count chunks. This is also helpful when I have odd numbers of rows to evenly match sideways against a number of stitches, matching halves, quarters and eighths together.
• They join sections of garments while I try them on for fit, and hold adjoining pieces of crochet together while I seam them.
• The different colours of my stitch markers can be a colour code to signify special instructions, placement of embellishments and embroidery or to identify parts of a project.

I’m sure I will discover many more uses for the tiny tools that make a big difference to the ease of working. I would be lost without them…maybe that is why, like Hansel and Gretel, I leave a trail…