On my very first lace project, it was inevitable that I would make a mistake somewhere as I was working across a row with a few hundred stitches. This, of course, led to shedding a few tears before spending the next day ever-so-carefully unknitting several rows of lace. Fast-forward a few months, when I stumbled across this amazing trick called a “lifeline.”
Simply put, a lifeline is a scrap piece of yarn that gets threaded through your live stitches on your needle and serves as a placeholder. If you realize you have made a mistake between your lifeline and the stitches on your needle, you can then happily pull your needle from the stitches and rip back until you hit your lifeline where you will find all of your stitches sitting happily on the scrap piece of yarn. You can then very easily place all of your stitches from your lifeline row back onto your needle, and continue forward!
And now, to take this little trick a step further, we’ve created a video tutorial that shows you how to use your Knit Picks Options Interchangeable Needles for lifelines! The best part? This useful tip shows you how to thread your lifeline scrap yarn through your stitches as you work across the row!
In addition to their pointy tips, the handy trick shown in our video tutorial demonstrates just one more reason why I love our Options Interchangeable Needles for lace knitting. The speed and ease of using a lifeline with the Options Interchangeable Needles makes me actually use this technique when it comes to lace knitting! Even though I knew I would regret not having a lifeline, the time-consuming step of threading my scrap yarn through each stitch, one-by-one, was enough for me to skip this vital trick at times. And just as luck would have it, no lifelines meant I would obviously have a mistake I needed to unknit.
But now, using this torque hole on the cable of the Interchangeable Options Needles – I have no excuses not to use lifelines in my lace knitting! Which I know will result in a much happier and much calmer knitting experience.
Do you have any favorite tricks or techniques that you use for lace knitting?
