Last night I finished off the thumb and sewed in the ends on the second beaded glove. They are, if I do say so myself, fantastic. And they will save my poor fingers from a chill on the way to and from school. Check it out:
I’ve got the pattern mostly written up but I’m planning on having a couple of sizes so it’s not quite ready to go yet. Hopefully I’ll have some time to sit down this weekend and finish it off.
Rather than just post pictures of beaded glove #2 today (which, shockingly, look pretty much like photos of glove #1), I thought I’d try my hand at a little tutorial on knitting with beads. This is one of those things that’s actually not technically that difficult, but can maybe be a little difficult to wrap your head around. I know I’ve tried it in the past with mixed results! So, without further ado:
1. Pick yarn and beads that are suitably matched to each other in terms of size. You want the bead to be large enough to string on the yarn, but not so large that it looks wonky or is going to be prone to sliding around a lot. For example, don’t put plastic pony beads on a fine lace weight yarn. The standard seed beads you can get at most large craft stores in the US are great for sport/fingering weight yarns.
2. Thread your beads onto your yarn. The easiest way to do this is to use a needle and thread and tie the thread onto the end of your yarn, like so:
Make sure you pick a needle that your beads will go over! I am just using a small sewing needle here, but you can also buy special beading needles that are extra thin. If you are threading onto a very fine weight yarn, beading needles may be a worthwhile investment (they’re fairly cheap), as you will probably want to use beads that are too small for any of the needles that come in a standard package of sewing/crafting needles.
Once you have the thread tied onto the yarn, start stringing on beads. Don’t get too carried away with the number of beads you string on—a large number of beads on the yarn can be difficult to manipulate, they can tend to “jam” in place. I would advise stringing a maximum of 200 beads at a time:
3. Start knitting. When you want to create a beaded stitch, bring one bead up the yarn. Don’t bring it all the way up to the right needle though! You want to have it a little way out, perhaps a centimeter, so that it will fall into the stitch you are knitting:
Knit the stitch. You may need to finagle with pulling the yarn through to ensure that the bead comes along for the ride. I find it helps to keep my right index finger up against the tip of the needle and the stitch, so the bead doesn’t have too many opportunities to slip off elsewhere:
4. Deciding which side of the stitch you want the bead on. This is probably pretty minor, but if you are doing a pattern where the placement of beads is at all symmetrical, then having the beads properly placed is a nice touch that will enhance the symmetrical appearance. The placement of the bead within the stitch really occurs on the row AFTER the row where the bead is placed. The illustrations here are for knitting in the round, so both the row where the bead is knit, and the one where it is aligned, are right side rows.
If you want the bead to fall on the right side of the stitch, insert your right hand needle ABOVE the bead when knitting the alignment round:
Want it on the left side? Insert your needle BELOW the bead:
If you are purling back across the row, you would reverse these instructions–insert the needle below for a right side alignment, and above for a left side alignment.
So for the gloves I am knitting now, where there is a V pattern forming, I am placing the beads associated with left leaning decreases on the left side of the stitch, and the stitches associated with right leaning decreases on the right side of the stitch. This alignment makes the symmetry of the beads line up with the symmetry of the decreases, so that both beads and decreases are centered on the same point.
The first glove moved into finger territory last night. Two down, two and a thumb to go:
And, I know I’ll probably start to sound like a broken record before these are done repeating this point, but….I love the way the beads have turned out.
My beaded gloves (which need a name….hmm), hit a small snag Tuesday evening. They were found to be too big. I had done a bit of increasing after finishing the cuff and, well, apparenty I went overboard. So I had to rip back down to the cuff and start over. On the plus side, the gloves are much better looking on now. Also, I really have the lace/bead pattern down now, so I’m zipping along. And, few stitches around means the gloves are way faster to knit. I’m now just past the thumb gusset and I might even be venturing into fingers territory soon:
An action shot:
This is the right hand glove and I am horribly right handed (which is really quite embarassing as a) I was able to right equally well with both hands up until at least the age of 10, and b) left-handedness actually runs in my family. You would think I would show some level of ambidexterity). The result is that taking a photo of the glove on the hand is quite tricky. Probably also quite amusing to watch, if you are an innocent bystander.
And of course, the best part of knitting with beads is having this nice rope of beaded yarn to play with:
I’ve been crazy busy with school stuff lately so not much knitting going on this week. I did get about half a wrist on this glove started though:
I like how it’s working up so far, nice and snug but not too tight.
Since Lillian has been brought to a crashing halt six inches from the finish line, I spent my knitting time this weekend catching up on another project:
It’s curling in a bit at the edges so you can’t see, but I just did the armhole bind off. Another inch or two and it’ll be time to start the neckline shaping. I’ve decided I’m not doing an official NaKniSweMo sweater, I’m just going to try to finish off Anne and Aisling.
And possibly also starting another small project.
I know, more purple. Maybe I should make a project of knitting through my stash by color, what do you think? Anyway, since I’ve started biking to school I’ve realized that it was very silly of me to leave my gloves back in North Carolina. Sure, it’s not exactly cold here, but my hands get the full brunt of whatever cold there is when I’m out biking. So I thought a pair of delicate, feminine gloves would be just the thing. I don’t want something super heavy as I’ll then arrive at school with sweat pouring off my hands. This is some 100% wool yarn I bought off elann almost 4 years ago. I have a couple of pounds of it, so I’ll need to come up with a few more suitable projects to use it all up. I rather like the look of the beads…I think I could quite easily go on a beaded knitting kick.
