Knit Minders

How about a quick little tutorial with crappy pictures? So those of you who knit know that sometimes it's hard to keep track of your place in your pattern. But you don't always have a magnet board with you. So - what else can you do? Use a knit minder - it's a two-sided magnet that will stick to itself through a piece of pattern to help you keep your place. So - let's make one, shall we?

What you need: Strip magnet, generally comes with sticky stuff on one side. Peel and stick adhesive, and ribbon slightly wider than your magnet. First, cut your magnet to the length you want. I like mine to be the size of a piece of patter - so these were cut about 8 1/2" long. You need two strip for each minder. Before you cut the second strip, stick it to the first one - paper sides out. It's important to do this before you adhere the ribbon to make sure your magnets are polarized properly and will actually stick together. Otherwise you could end up with a minder that looks like this. Ask me how I know.

Pull the paper off one piece of the magnet strip and carefully adhere your ribbon to the magnet. Slowly put the ribbon down and smooth it out. Leave about an inch on one end of the magnet. With the ribbon still attached to the spool, turn the magnet strips over and pull the paper off the second magnet strip. Leave about a 1 1/2" piece of ribbon before you start adhering the ribbon to the second magnet strip. Again - leave about an inch of ribbon at the end of the magnet strip.

Place a small piece of the peel and stick adhesive to the wrong side of the ribbon, pull the paper off the peel and stick and adhere the ribbon to the wrong side of the magnet strips.

And here's a bunch of finished knit minder sets. There are 2 knit minders per set, each with different coordinating ribbons. The short one is about 9" long and the long ones are about 11 1/2" long - to be able to keep your place depending upon the orientation of the graph.

Enjoy.