Knitting Tips

I's taken from 501 Knitting Secrets educational series:

• To keep from losing your cable needle between twist rows, try sticking the needle into your watchband.
• Knit a little stuffed ball, like a small pincushion, and hang it on a cord around your neck. Now you have a tool to hold tapestry needles and cable needles when they are not in use.
• Because stockinette stitches are short and wide, designs charted on a square grid will be distorted when they are knit. Instead of using square graph paper, use knitter's graph paper, which has a rectangular grid. If you can't find knitter's graph paper, use a computer spreadsheet program to create and print a rectangular grid.
• Drop-shoulder sweaters require a shorter sleeve length than usual. To figure the sleeve length needed for a drop-shoulder sweater, measure the intended wearer from the center back neck to the wrist.
  Divide the finished chest measurement of the sweater by four, and subtract this number from the first number. The difference is the sleeve length.
  For example:
  Measurement from center back neck to wrist: 29 inches.
  Finished chest measurement: 46 inches
  46 divided by 4 = 11.5
  29 inches - 11.5 = 17.5-inch sleeve length.
• Learn to "read" your knitting. Understanding how stitches relate to one another, and being able to see what you are supposed to do next, makes knitting easier. You will not have to rely on row-by-row instructions, and you will be able to recognize when the pattern contains a mistake, or when you have made a mistake.
• If you are modifying a pattern, write down your changes. You may decide later to duplicate the same garment; if you do not write it down, you will not remember what you did.
• Even if you have worked a swatch and have gotten the gauge to match the one called for in the pattern, check your work from time to time. The gauge on the garment may change as you work and become more comfortable with the knitting.
• When you are approaching the end of your ball of yarn and start to wonder how many rows you can still get from it, fold the remaining yarn in half and tie a loose overhand knot at the halfway point. Knit a row. If you reach the knot before you finish the row, you will not have enough yarn to complete a second row. If, however, you finish the row before reaching the knot, you can complete another row with the remaining yarn.