We all do it. Start a new crochet project before you finish the one you’re working on. We’ve even given it a nice socially acceptable name – Work in Progress! Having multiple projects going is absolutely NOT a bad thing. You never know when you will have a flash of inspiration or when the creative spark will ignite. I am a firm believer that you should ALWAYS act on that flash or spark or whatever it is that makes you love to always be creating something. 

Here is where it becomes a problem for me. It’s not when I have bags and bins full of yarn for the next 20 projects threatening to spill out of the closet each time I open the door. It’s not that I have WiPs stacked (sort of) neatly on every flat surface of my living room. The problem is, that I sometimes don’t have enough hooks.

I have the amount of hooks that a sane person should have 🙂 . It’s only when all of the amazing new projects that I must start RIGHT NOW, all use the same hook size. This by itself is usually not a problem. I simply take the hook out of the project I started and (subsequently stopped the next day), stick a safety pin through the last stitch and blissfully start the next project. No problem……..until last week. 😦

I was so excited to make and blog about all of the little heart patterns that I found. I was grabbing every available hook that I had. So now that the flurry of cute hearts are done and I’m ready to resume some of my other projects I realized that I didn’t remember what hook I was using on 2 of them.  Uh-oh.

I was able to figure it out only because on those two projects I distinctly remember that I used the size hook that was recommended for the yarn I was using AND the yarn still had the label on it. It occurred to me then that it would be very easy for me to forget what hook size I was using and not have the yarn label or some other way of knowing. Frankly I’m surprised that this has never happened to me before.

This is what I came up with to make certain that I will never be in that Uh-oh place again. 

My daughter has a big plastic barrel full of beads – and she happened to have beads with letters on them in her collection. I took some of the letter beads that correspond to my hook sizes to slip onto my stitch marker. Problem solved! If you don’t have letter beads, or a daughter that collects beads, you can get a bag really cheap at Walmart or a craft store. I may even see if she has some with numbers on them so I can mark rows or rounds too.

Regarding stitch markers – I have seen some cute and pretty stitch markers that I just love. These are great – except I don’t like to spend any of my crochet budget on anything other than yarn. So, I have my collection of safety pins, and wire rings from wine glass markers that lost the cute charms on them long ago, the scrap piece of yarn, and the ever popular paper clips that I use.

Attention Friends, Family & Loved ones – I really like the cute, pretty stitch markers I just don’t want to buy them so please feel free to buy them for me. 🙂

Thanks for reading!

~Tami – Tanglewood Knots