The Tiny Tool That Fixed My Stitch Count

I have a confession that would have embarrassed me at the yarn circle a year ago. I could not count to ten with a hook in my hand. Not reliably, anyway. I would get to row seven, look down, and realize I had nine stitches where ten should be. Then I would rip out the row and start over, because the alternative was an afghan that leaned like a staircase.

For thirty years I crocheted the same way: I counted in my head, I counted out loud, and I still lost my place every single time the phone rang or one of the cats decided the yarn was a toy. Romeo and Juliette are four now and they still cannot resist a moving strand. Stormy, my Afghan hound, is better about it, but she sheds enough that I have learned to keep finished pieces in a basket with a lid.

So when a friend from the circle brought a bag of HiMo locking stitch markers to the table one Tuesday, I was polite and skeptical. A hundred little plastic clips, she said, and you will never lose your row again. I have bought plenty of gadgets that promised to fix my counting. Most of them live in a drawer. But she handed me one, I clipped it into the row, and I did not stop using them for the rest of the project.

This is not a story about a magic fix. It is a story about a tool that does one small job and does it well, and about what changed when I stopped trusting my memory and started trusting a piece of plastic the size of a paperclip.

I stopped ripping out rows at eleven at night. That alone was worth the price of the bag.

Here is what actually happens with a locking stitch marker. You finish a row, you clip the marker into the first stitch of that row, and you have a physical place that does not move. When you come back after dinner, after the phone call, after untangling Juliette from the working yarn, you do not have to reconstruct where you were from memory. The marker is sitting there in the fabric like a bookmark.

The HiMo set comes with a hundred markers in a mix of colors, which sounds like more than anyone needs until you start using them for everything. I use one color to mark the start of a row in a blanket. I use another color to mark where an increase goes in amigurumi, because I always lose track of the sixth stitch. I use a third color to mark the middle of a long foundation chain so I can count out forty stitches in two halves instead of one long string.

The locking mechanism is the part I was most worried about. I have used cheap markers that popped open at the worst moment, and I have used safety pins, which hold fine but stab me in the thumb. My right thumb already aches from arthritis, so I do not want anything sharp near it. These HiMo markers snap shut with a small click and they stay shut while the work sits in my lap. I have not had one pop open on me yet.

They are also light enough that they do not drag on the fabric. I worried a hundred clips would weigh down a blanket, but a single marker weighs almost nothing. You feel it when you run your hand over the row, which is exactly the point. You never have to hunt for it.

The honest tradeoff is that a bag of a hundred is a lot of little pieces to keep organized. I keep mine in a small tin on the side table next to my armchair, and I still find them in couch cushions and under the cat bed. That is not a reason to skip them. It is a reason to buy a tin with a lid, which is what I did. The other tradeoff is that they are plastic, so they are not the prettiest thing in your hook case. I stopped caring about pretty the night I finished a row without counting it three times.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you were here, coffee in hand, Stormy asleep on the rug, I would tell you this: if you have ever ripped out a row because you lost count, buy the markers. Not the fancy single ones, not the ones that look like little jewels. A plain bag of HiMo locking stitch markers, a hundred of them, in mixed colors, so you can color-code a project the way I do.

Start with one marker. Clip it into the first stitch of your row and see how it feels to come back to a project and know exactly where you are. Then start using them everywhere. The counting did not get easier for me. The markers just made it so I did not have to count so much, and that is a better fix than any amount of willpower.