Repeat Trick

Here's a nifty little trick I learned from Lizbeth Upitis many years ago at a Minnesota Knitters' Guild Yarnover. If you have a pattern that involves repeats every x number of rows you can use a piece of extra yarn to help you keep track of your repeats. Take a piece of scrap yarn and double it, then tie knots in it (far enough apart so that you can get your knitting needle into the holes in between the knots) equal to the number of rows in your repeat. One end will have a loop in it formed by the doubling of the strand of yarn. This is the end that I call my "repeat loop." Here is a photo of what several of these look like.



In the photo above, the "repeat loop" is on the right hand side of each of these "Repeat Threads" or RTs. The bottom one has 10 holes, the next one has 8, then 6, then 4, then 2.

To illustrate the use of an RT imagine you are doing a cable that needs to be crossed every 6 rows. So, you make a RT with 6 holes in it (tie 6 knots). The trick is to put the RT onto your needle either at the beginning of the row (or if you are doing a repeated motif within the body of your sweater, at the beginning of the motif) the very first time you cross your cable, making sure that you use the end of the RT (your "repeat loop"). On the next row, when you get to where the RT is, slip it to the other needle,but slip one hole down on the RT. Do this every row, until there are no more holes to slip into, then you know that you are on a repeat row. This time, slip the RT back on at the "repeat loop," cross your cable on that row, then keep going.

This trick works really well if you are doing different cable patterns within a sweater that don't repeat on the same row. Just put RTs at the beginning of each cable section and follow that.