Tip and Tricks: Add Beads To Your Knitting With Pre-Threading

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So you would like to add beads to your knitting. If you are lucky, you find a pattern that sings to you where the designer has already planned for beads and tells you where and how to add them.

But what if you find a design that you love but want to add that extra bit of bling to it. How can you do that?

There are many ways to add beads to knitwear. I'd like to explore these a bit with you starting with Pre-Threading as an option.

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Pre-threading beads onto yarn (or thread as for example when knitting any of our Jewelry Creations can seem like a long and boring task before you can get to the good stuff but it has some great advantages.

For one thing, you can easily get smaller beads onto your yarn this way, e.g. size 8/0 beads can easily be threaded onto fingering weight yarn whereas adding them by other methods can be a chore.

When you add beads that have been pre-threaded you are essentially sliding the bead between two stitches instead of upon a stitch. And it shows up best on the opposite side of your work (so you add beads on "wrong side" rows and they appear on "right side" rows).

But best of all, you can slide multiple beads as well as one-at-a-time (which we are more used to) and create some very interesting looks.

Take a look at these two examples:

The first is Laura Nelkin's Undulating Scarf design -- notice the multiple beads sliding across the knitting.

The second is a gorgeous bracelet design by Brenda Franklin. Notice how she uses the multiple beads to very great advantage.

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