Yesterday's post got me thinking. (Always dangerous.)?

There must be tasks we wish our knitting or crocheting tools could do, either as tweaks to existing products, or as entirely new items. I've come up with several minor ones over the years. In the spirit of Anne L. MacDonald* At the risk of compromising patentability or re-inventing the wheel, I invite people to share ideas, and prime the pump with some of my own.

Counting Beads



I wrote about these back in my Stupid Stitch Marker Tricks post. This is intended to be an aid for people who are working row count repeats or those annoying "Decrease two stitches every sixth row" directions. It's a chain with links large enough to admit a knitting needle, and two different color beads, one at each end. On the first row, the knitter puts the needle into the link closest to the green bead. On the next row (or next right side row if working in the flat), the knitter advances the needle to the next link, and so on. If the links are used to count pairs of rows, a six-link chain could count 12.

Inch-Striped DPNs

I know I've seen photos of WWII-vintage DPNs that were striped, but I don't know if they were striped off in exact inch measurements (or 2 cm for our metric friends). If I had a set of striped DPNs I could use them to measure off length as I knit, without fumbling around for a tape measure or ruler.

Two-Tone DPNs

This idea could be used in combo with the stripes, above. I wrote about this one in the post remarking on a really bad answer offered up by Lion Brand. If one had a set of similarly colored DPNs that had a different color marking one end of each needle, one could use that color to track where rounds began and ended. (Yes, I know most people look for the tail, but sometimes it can be less evident, like when you're knitting a flat motif center out.)? The knitter would knit all DPNs with the same color end, EXCEPT for the one that starts off the round. That one would be employed with the contrasting color first. If we used red and green again, we'd knit the first needle with the green end, so that the red end was rightmost in the work. All successive needles would be knit with the red end. As the knitter traveled around the work he or she would know that when a red end presented itself, that was Needle #1.

Long, Thin Sticky Notes

This one is left over from my stitching days, although I sometimes do use sticky notes to mark my place on knitting charts. I want a pad of sticky notes that's six inches wide and less than an inch deep. The sticky should be along the long edge, not at the tab end. If it had? 10 to the inch rules on it with prominent decads, so much the better. I want to use it to mark off the active row of an active knitting or stitching chart. Having rules on the thing would help me keep my place on the chart and if the chart's scale was 10 to the inch - allow me to do "speed counting."

Anyone have any other innovative ideas for working tools, storage ideas, charting aids, or other new thoughts for here-to-for unknown tools or tweaks to existing ones?

*Anne L. MacDonald is best known for her book No Idle Hands:? The Social History of American Knitting, but she also wrote Feminine Ingenuity: How Women Inventors Changed America.