![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/daily_4\/3919_beads_1.jpg\")
<\/p>\nAt some point I bought a set of perfect stitch markers, made of glass beads on jewellery wire. You can see them in many past photos of my knitting projects, especially in the early stages of each sweater and cardigan, where I use them to mark the increase points.<\/p>\n
For several years I’ve been on the lookout for more of the same kind, but not found any. The shops here only sell the other kind, like little safety pins. I don’t like those; they are too hard and I feel like they get in my way all the time. They’re OK for marking rows, but not for stitches. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The obvious solution is, of course, to make my own. From some forgotten past project, I already had some tubs of cheap beads – not as nice as the glass beads on the OG markers, but they’ll do. The two missing components I needed to buy were nylon-coated jewellery wire, and crimp beads.<\/p>\n
The process itself was quite intuitive and easy to figure out. Cut a piece of wire, thread on some beads, crimp the outer bead, crimp the inner bead, cut off the ends.<\/p>\n
Tweezers turned out to be essential. The crimp beads are absolutely tiny. They were sold by the gram – i.e. a package contains one gram of beads – and according to the product info, that one gram has around 90 beads.<\/p>\n
![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/daily_4\/3919_beads_2.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Now I have eight new stitch markers. One more batch (some other day, because now it’s close to midnight) and then I can mark all the sixteen increase points on the dress. Right now I have markers at eight points only, at the top of each wedge, and count stitches forwards and backwards from those points to figure out where the actual increases should go. That worked OK when it as just a few stitches to count – I could even eyeball the number without actual counting – but now that the increases are happening ten stitches away from the marker, it’s getting less convenient. It’ll be nicer with actual markers.<\/p>\n
![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/daily_4\/3919_beads_3.jpg\")
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At some point I bought a set of perfect stitch markers, made of glass beads on jewellery wire. You can see them in many past photos of my knitting projects, especially in the early stages of each sweater and cardigan, where I use them to mark the increase points. For several years I’ve been on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[767,18,768],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crafts-2","category-dailies","category-photography-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21486"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21491,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21486\/revisions\/21491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}