Knit HeartStrings Learn-and-Knit-Alongs

We had a lot of great tips posted about people’s favorite ways of reading a lace chart and keeping their place in the chart. Thank you for sharing!

If you have not already read the Keeping Your Place in a Chart comments, I encourage you to do so now. You never know when a new idea, or even an idea you had not thought of in a while, can come in handy to make your knitting easier and more enjoyable.

Here’s one  I had not thought of. See, I am always learning more, too! Thanks to Leslie for the idea of

“using a cookie sheet as my magnetic chart stand”.

I currently don’t have any cookie sheets that are magnetic (I only have some old aluminum ones), so I’ve put on my shopping list to get a stainless steel one that is (e.g. like this). Although it is unlikely we will need a large cookie sheet size magnet board for any of our bit-size projects, you never know when it might be needed for a larger lace chart project in the future. And meantime, I can even use it to make cookies, lol.

Isn’t it great to add to your knitting bag of tips and tricks? Are there any you have recently added because of Bits of Lace? Something you picked up on might have been missed by someone else, so it never hurts to repeat.

There are probably just as many good ways to help keep your place in a chart as there are people here in our group, lol. Just type a search term like “keeping your place in a chart” into Google and you will read lots of suggestions. So I’m not even going to attempt to tell you all the ways because you are likely to already have a foundation for your own preferences. In fact, I am going to ask you later below to help me out  by sharing your own favorite.

For the bit-sized story here, I’m going to just touch on a couple of main points —

We’ve already covered good working conditions for avoiding mistakes. Applying those to our reading of charts goes doubly ditto. Especially the part about good lighting, contrast and magnification if necessary. For example, charts in some publications can be terribly tiny or difficult to read. So, enlarge or re-transcribe them to make it easier to see. Highlight with different colors any symbols that are confusingly similar.

I am partial to using some kind of straight edge to keep my place, whether it is in written instructions or charted. Sometimes I just use a ruler, sometimes a magnet strip on a metal board (like cross stitchers use), and sometimes removable post-it note(s). Some people like to use removable highlighter tape. The idea is that you can use whatever helps you focus on the row you are working.

The main difference I would suggest in keeping your place on a chart (vs. what I do in written instructions) is to put the straight edge focus ABOVE the row you are working on.

I know the logical thing seems to be that you would put the straight edge below (because that is what we’ve usually been taught to do when keeping our place when reading text).  It’s not wrong to do so, but this is where you can really leverage the usefulness of charts being visual representations. So I’d really like you to try the ABOVE method with charts if you haven’t done so before.

The similarity in visual representation of the rows you have already worked on the chart, compared to the knitting hanging below your needle at the place in the row you are now working, will help you keep your place in the chart.

Now it’s your turn. Do you have a favorite bit-sized tip for keeping your place in a chart that you’d like to share? Don’t be shy. There are no wrong answers. Let’s see how many different ones come up!