If you're not a crafter... I'm sorry.
If you want a closer look at the pictures/labels, click on the picture and it will open up larger for you.
Lifelines are a "marker" that you put into your knitting that runs across a row to prevent the stitches from further unraveling if they are dropped. Many people use lifelines in different ways, and they show up mostly in lace knitting.
For a life line you will need thread or yarn (to be discussed in detail momentarily), a small crochet hook or a blunt needle, scissors, and your project. I have these laid out in the below picture with my project with two current lifelines in place. There is an arrow pointing to one but it can be hard to make out the white thread against the pastel colors of my yarn.
You will want to choose a material for your thread that is not going to damage your yarn in the case of friction as you will be stretching the stitches that the yarn sits across as you look at your project and in most cases you want to use a material that is thinner that your working yarn. Many people swear by unwaxed dental floss.
To have enough room to stretch out my project, I cut my thread to two and a half times the width of the project:
You can then use the crochet hook or the blunt needle to run the thread through the stitches*.
Crochet hook:
Blunt needle:
Be careful to not thread the lifeline through the stitch markers (unlike above crochet hook placement picture) unless you would like to keep the marker in that area.
You can then secure you lifelines in with a slipknot in the below manner:
To help them from coming out before you choose to take them out. You can also leave the ends hanging or tie the ends together, whatever way is more comfortable for you.
Now you can continue knitting.
If you've had a little bit of difficulty seeing my lifeline, this picture may help as I have a black box in the area of one of the two lifelines in at this point of the project. I will get black thread for my next lifeline and take a picture of that for future reference.
The frequency as to placement of lifelines and how many are ultimately up to you and your comfort level. When I put out a request on the Knitters Review Forums the answers were as varied as is everything else is in knitting.
Some of the best suggestions as to placement were:
1. At the beginning of a lace repeat.
2. At a row before major shaping.
3. At any point where you have had a previous issue.
In the case of designing suggestions for placement also included:
1. Anywhere you have determined you like.
2. When you've completed all the work you can for the day.
As to how long to leave them in suggestions included:
1. Keep two lifelines in lace at all times, each at the beginning of pattern repeats reusing the same two threads.
2. When you are comfortable with the work that you've done and are ready to reuse the string at the next lifeline point.
For myself (and that is Convertible that the pictures are from) I'm keeping two active lifelines in the work just because I am so bad at deciding to frog things because of mistakes and am pulling the bottom one to place whenever I have finished all 12 rows in one pattern repeat. As it was I frogged and had to recast on on the first day of the project because I chose not to place a lifeline when I completed my garter stitch border before moving on to the pattern and lost a stitch while doing that. I would have just been able to recover the stitch and keep moving if I had placed the lifeline.
*As stated before I'm now knitting different lace. The Feather and Fan circular shawl that I have linked over in my side bar.
The first of this shawl was knitted on DPN's and I found it too tedious to add in the lifeline with a crochet hook or blunt needle after the fact. So instead, using crochet thread and the smallest regular needle I could find I held the needle threaded with the crochet thread and the working DPN together during the row that I wanted to add the lifeline too. (I promise I'll put pictures or video up later as this can seem confusing) I was able to keep my stitch markers out of the lifeline as I was controlling what stitch went over both needles.
After switching to my Boye circular set I would wait for the stitches to get to the connecting hole and thread my crochet thread through that and allow the stitches to just scoop it up as they went around. The only problem with this is that it tied up my stitch markers.
Hope this helps some of you. I'll try to get more pictures and videos up of current methods to help and give you plenty of options with this!
No comments:
Post a Comment