A little touch of bling

One of our most popular inhouse patterns is the Party Lace Scarf. It's the pattern that we use in our lace classes, and it's been made in an amazing variety of weights and fibres (though the original is in luscious mohair and silk). The little touch of beading at the beginning and end is optional, but it makes the scarf that little bit prettier, and we've been asked for help in adding it several times. So we though it would be a good idea to post a tutorial here. There's several different ways of adding beads to your work. This one involves threading the beads onto the yarn in advance. For this, a beading needle really helps - it's essentially all hole, so there's no difficulty in threading your yarn through it. So thread your beads onto your yarn, and move them well up away from the end. You're going to need enough beadless yarn to cast on with before you get to the beading stage. Cast on the required number of stitches, ignoring the beads entirely. Then begin to work your beaded row. We shot this part way along the row, so there's some beads already in place, but each of them is placed in exactly the same way, and here's how. Bring the yarn to the front as if you were going to purl the next stitch... ... and slip the next stitch purlwise without working it at all. Hoosh the closest bead up along the yarn until it's right in front of the stitch you slipped: Then bring the yarn back to the rear of the work. This snuggles up the bead to the front of the slipped stitch: When you knit the next stitch, the bead will be held firmly in place. And this is the result: a bead placed neatly along the edge of the work, just like its neighbours. One thing that we've learned the hard way (so you don't have to!) is that if you're placing beads in a specific order - say, in a coloured pattern or using several sizes - the first-placed bead should be the last one threaded. Top tip, there! Edit: This is just one way of adding beads to your knitting, and we also have a tutorial on adding beads to your work as you knit. Check it out here. Now we want to put beads on everything. And we can't really think of a good reason not to. Can you? Enjoyed this tutorial? Remember we run a whole series of classes in our shop in Dublin. You can check out the upcoming schedule here.