Extra Tools for Knitting: Stitch Holders

Hi I'm Jen Lucas for The Knitting Circle. In this video, let's take a look at stitch holders. Stitch holders are a knitting notion that you might need for particular types of projects. You might need it for a sweater for fingerless mitt, or mitten or a toy. It's a tool that you can use to hold stitches off of your knitting needle, That will be worked later while you continue to knit the stitches that are on your knitting needle. So let's go ahead and take a look at different types of stitch holders. When it comes to stitch holders there are a few different kinds you can choose from, like many knitting notions. There's a variety, and you just need to figure out which is the best one for you. Probably the most common one that you will see is one of these that looks like a giant sort of safety pin. And you can see here, it just opens up like this. So I have a little bit of knitting here. So with this particular stitch holder, you just open it up and you can see the ends almost like a knitting needle. And you could just slip the number of stitches that you need to hold off and then you would just close it. And then this would hang down while you continue your knitting. Same thing with all of these. This is another type that comes in different sizes. And this one, you just take the end off and then you have basically a knitting needle that you can put your stitches on to hold them. When I have a smaller project something like a fingerless mitt or a mitten sometimes I'll even just use one of these stitch markers. If I only need to hold off a few stitches I'll just use one or two of these to hold my stitches and use this as a stitch holder just cause it's obviously much less cumbersome than something like this. And if you don't have any of these tools all you really need is some waste yarn and a tapestry needle. So if we go back to this one here I'll just slip these back onto my needle. When I'm knitting something like a sweater and I need to hold a lot of stitches to be worked later I actually like to just use waste yarn and a tapestry needle. So you're going to want to use a yarn that's a different color ideally than the yarn that you're using to knit with because you are going to have to come back later and pull this out. And then there's real easy to see where your waste yarn is. So with this all I would do is just thread my tapestry needle. And if I needed to hold off a few stitches here at the beginning, I would just slide them to the tapestry needle, pull them off, and then I like to, I would tie this together just prevent the stitches from falling off my waste yarn. So I just loosely tie it like this. And I can use that as a stitch holder as well. Again, I like to use this and again it's just my personal preference when I'm doing something like a sweater. And especially if you're knitting a sweater in a fine gauge like in a fingering weight yarn or something you might have to hold off a lot of stitches to work the next part of your sweater. So I like to do this because this is really light and it'll stay out of my way very easily. But again, like many knitting notions it really just comes down to preference and figuring out which one you like the best. That's it. This really does come down to personal preference with stitch holders. And also it might depend on the project which stitch holder will be right for you. I'm Jen Lucas for The Knitting Circle. I hope that you enjoyed this video and I'll see you back here again real soon.