How to Never Lose Your Place in a Knitting Pattern

You put the lace shawl down on Sunday evening. On Wednesday you pick it up again, and nothing agrees: the last pencil tick is beside row 9, the counter says 34, and the stitches aren’t telling. It’s easy to lose your place in a knitting pattern, because your place is never a single number. It’s a row, a point along that row, a repeat and a size, and each of them is kept somewhere different. This guide shows how to pin all four down, so that picking your knitting up again takes a minute.

Why you lose your place in a knitting pattern

“Repeat rows 1 to 8 until the piece measures 40 cm” is one line on the page and a month of evenings in your lap. To know where you are, you need four answers:

• Which row? The line of the pattern, or the row of the chart, that comes next.
• Where along the row? If you stopped in the middle, the stitch you stopped at.
• Which repeat? Row 5 of an 8-row pattern comes round again and again, and you need to know which time this is.
• Which size? In “cast on 88 (96, 104, 112) stitches”, only one of the four numbers is yours.

Most lost places come from keeping one of the four and trusting memory with the others. The cure is to give every answer a home outside your head.

Make the pattern yours before you cast on

Work from a copy you can write on: print the PDF, or photocopy the page for your own use.

• Circle your size. Go through the whole pattern and mark your number in every set of brackets. If you’re knitting the second size, that’s the 96 in “88 (96, 104, 112)”, and the first number inside the brackets everywhere else. It prevents a body in one size with sleeves in another.
• Number what isn’t numbered. Where the pattern says “work 23 rows even”, write 1 to 23 in the margin. Where it says “repeat rows 1 to 8 five more times”, write out what that comes to: 6 repeats, 48 rows.
• Unpack “at the same time”. Two instructions that run side by side belong in a small grid, with a line for every row. The guide on how to keep track of increases and decreases shows how to draw one.

Keeping your place from one row to the next

Tick the rows you’ve finished

The simplest record is a tick beside each row as you finish it. For a pattern that repeats, draw a grid with a column for each repeat and a line for each row. The ticks then show which repeat you’re in, which a single number never does.

A tick means done, so the row to knit is the first one without a tick.

Move a marker down the page

For written instructions, a sticky note is enough. Line its top edge up beneath the row you’re working, and move it down a line when that row is finished. The next few rows are covered, so your eye can’t jump ahead to one that looks similar.

Let a counter hold the row

A counter saves you the pencil, and it brings one trap with it: what does its number mean? Count each row when you finish it, and the counter shows the rows you’ve done. If it says 12, row 12 is behind you and row 13 comes next. Tap before the row on some days and after it on others, and you’ll be a row out.

In a repeating pattern, the count and the pattern row drift apart. After 46 rows of an 8-row repeat, you’ve finished 5 whole repeats, which are 40 rows, and 6 rows of the next one. So the row to read is row 7 of the 6th repeat. You can do that sum every time you sit down, or leave it to a counter.

Rowpip, the one we make, does it with a pattern repeat. From the menu you give it the rows in one repeat, 8 here, and you can leave the number of times open for a pattern that only says “repeat until”. A line under the count then names the row to read next: “Next: row 7 of 8 · repeat 6”. For “work 120 rows even”, set a finish target of 120, and the counter shows “of 120” with a progress line.

If counting gets skipped because your hands are full, the guide to knitting with a smartwatch moves the button to your wrist.

Keeping your place along the row

A row counter knows nothing about where you are inside a row. Markers do.

Put a ring marker on the needle between pattern repeats. A 10-stitch repeat worked 9 times, with 2 edge stitches at each side, is 94 stitches, and with a marker after every repeat you never count past 10. If a repeat comes out at 9 stitches or 11, the mistake is inside it, and you’ve caught it before the row is over. The guide to stitch markers and lifelines has more ways to use them.

If you have to stop in the middle of a row, finish the repeat you’re in, so that you stop at a marker, and write down how many repeats of that row are done. When you pick the work up again, the yarn shows you which way to go: it hangs from the last stitch you made, and the needle holding that stitch goes in your right hand.

Following a chart without getting lost

A chart is a picture of the fabric seen from the right side, and you read it the way the knitting grows, from the bottom row upwards. Right-side rows are read from right to left. Wrong-side rows are read from left to right, with every symbol standing for its opposite: a square that means knit on the right side means purl on the wrong side. In the round, every round is read from right to left.

• Put the marker above the row. Lay a strip of highlighter tape, or the magnet of a chart board, just above the row you’re knitting. Your eye stops at its edge, and the rows you’ve knitted stay in view underneath. Those rows are what hangs from your needle, so you can hold the knitting up to the chart and see whether the two agree.
• Colour it in. Go over each kind of symbol with a pencil of its own: every yarn over in yellow, say, and every decrease in blue.
• Mark the repeat. Most charts put a heavier outline round the stitches that repeat. Place your ring markers where that outline begins and ends, and the chart and the needle match section for section.

Leave a note before you put it down

Your place is easiest to record at the moment you stop, and hardest to rebuild a week later. Before the knitting goes into its bag:

1. Finish the row, or at least the repeat.
2. Write down the row you’ll knit next, in words nobody could misread: “next: row 7 of chart B, 6th repeat, size 2”.
3. Add what the pattern can’t know: the needle size, if you’re taking the needles out, and anything you’ve changed, such as “body 4 rows longer”.
4. Keep the note with the knitting, not with the pattern. A paper tag on a locking marker, clipped to the work, can’t end up in a different bag.
5. If the break will be weeks long, thread a lifeline through the stitches on the needle first.

Reading your place back from the knitting

When the notes have failed, the fabric still knows. Three questions get you most of the way.

Is a right-side or a wrong-side row next? Take the needle with the stitches in your left hand, with the working yarn hanging at its tip, ready to knit. The face of the fabric that’s turned towards you is the face you’ll work next. In most patterns, the right-side rows are the odd ones.

What did the last row look like? Compare the stitches just under your needle with the pattern rows you think you’ve done. A yarn over is a hole. A decrease is two stitches leaning into one. A purl on a knit ground is a bump. Find the last row of the pattern whose marks you can see in the fabric, and the one after it is yours. The guide to reading your knitting in garter and stockinette explains how to follow one column of stitches upwards.

How many rows since the last landmark? In a cable pattern, find the last crossing. The stitches that slant across were stretched by the crossing, and the first upright stitches above them belong to the crossing row. Call that row 1 and count up to the needle. If the cable crosses every 8th row and the stitch on your needle is number 5, knit 3 more rows and cross on the row after them.

What to do when your place is gone

1. Stop. Don’t knit another row on a guess.
2. Count the stitches on your needle and compare the number with the pattern. In a shaped piece, the stitch count alone narrows the rows down.
3. Ask the fabric the three questions above.
4. If two answers still fit, tink back, which is unknitting one stitch at a time, to the last row you can name for certain, or rip back to your lifeline.
5. Write the place down, set your counter, and tick the pattern, so that all three tell the same story again.

Your place in the pattern, in short

• Your place is four things: the row, the point along it, the repeat and the size. Give each a home on paper, on the needle or in a counter.
• Count a row when it’s finished, and let ticks, a grid or a counter with repeats say which pattern row comes next.
• Leave a note with the knitting every time you stop.

Keeping your place is half the job, and the count is the other half. The guide to how to count rows in knitting covers the counting.