Stitch holders are safety nets for your knitting
Glenna Harris
We talked about stitch markers earlier, now we’re
going to take a moment to extol the virtues of
stitch holders. These little life-savers aren’t hard to
use, but we tend to use them while making slightly
more advanced projects, so as you progress in
your knitting skills you’ll find yourself reaching for
them more and more. Stitch holders are safety
nets for your knitting.
Stitch holders come in different sizes, ranging from
just a few inches long to nearly a foot. They’re
a staple of the yarn shop tools display, and so
helpful to use once you start knitting garments
like sweaters. They're designed to do exactly what
you might think – hold stitches aside, securely, for
a portion of your project. (If you needed to put
the whole piece aside for a short while, you would
simply leave it on the needles).
You’ll commonly see pattern directions telling
you to use a stitch holder when you’re starting
the neckline of a sweater while working from the
bottom up. On the sweater pictured above, (which
is the Ravine pullover pattern), you can see the
center of the scoop neckline starts across the
middle cable panel, and on each side just above
that are the rows of decreases that shape the rest
of the scoop. This bottom center of the scoop
is first established by holding the stitches aside,
and then working each side of the sweater front
one side at a time. Once you’ve held the middle
stitches aside, you’re essentially working two
pieces, not just one.
Stitch holders come in many sizes and are
designed to securely hold your stitches aside.
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KNITmuch | issue 1
When the sweater is all finished, the collar is
worked by picking up stitches all along the edge
of the neck, and transferring those stitches held
aside back onto your needles so that they can be
worked into the ribbing as pictures. So, once the
sweater is done you can’t really tell that anything
was temporarily held aside! It’s all just one step in
the process of completing your sweater.