Questions, Hints & Tips
Our customers are always offering helpful advice and we love passing this information on, if you have a hint or tip that others would find useful, please let us know and we will include it in this section. There are also a few things we have picked up along the way which we hope you’ll find helpful.
An easy way to thread beads onto knitting yarn… Thread a beading or sewing needle with a piece of cotton and tie a knot to make a loop. Take your knitting (or crochet!) yarn and put it through the loop. Thread a bead onto the needle and down over the cotton and folded over yarn and down onto the single yarn.
Dealing with knots in your yarn... If you are knitting with hanks of yarn which need winding into balls we have found a great way to minimise any problems caused by knots in the yarn. If you come across a knot in the yarn, fold back a length of yarn and gently knot it so that you hopefully have enough to finish the row with. There’s nothing worse than getting to the middle of a row and then having to take the whole row back because of a knot! The arrow shows the knot so you can see roughly how much I’ve wound off.
Stitch Holder solution... I have also run out of stitch holders (again, something to do with the other projects I am halfway through I think!) and have come across a great solution - Tie Wraps. As you can see I have used one for each shoulder on the back of my coat and they have worked fine! I know they are not environmentally friendly as you cannot re-use them but at least they can be recycled afterwards.
Straightening out circular needles… Do you find it difficult to knit with a new circular needle? If you hold the plastic length of the needle over a steaming kettle and pull on either end, you will find that the kinks even out and make knitting far easier. Alternatively, try using Lang or Addi circular needles which don’t curl up in this way.
Scarf fringing… Are you unsure how much yarn to leave for fringing at the end of a project? Why not wind your fringing yarn off first onto a piece of card winding round the number of times you need for your fringes or tassels and then knit with the remainder to the end. This way you’ll be sure you’ve got enough yarn to make a beautiful fringe.
Sorting bamboo needles… Thanks to Dawn for this tip! If you have trouble finding a matching pair of bamboo needles in your needle case, why not paint each size with a different colour nail polish! Of course you may need to buy a few more colours to do all your needles, but your toes will thank you!
The dreaded sewing up… A lot of us hate the thought of sewing a garment up when it’s finished
so here are a few tips to help:
If you have a straight cast off on a shoulder seam with no shaping, why not save the stitches from
one piece on a stitch holder and then cast off both together using a third needle.
Why not try sewing up with a crochet instead?
If you are knitting a jumper, why not knit the front and back together up to the armholes using a circular needle? Just mark the side seams with stitch markers and then you can still do your shapings as you go.
Another thing we’re seeing a lot now on patterns is instead of knitting sleeves separately, pick up the stitches around the armhole and knit towards the cuff. This serves two purposes, two less seams to sew and also you can easily make the sleeve as long or short as you want.
