Left-handed // How to use a stitch marker when crocheting in continuous rounds

in this video i’m going to show you how to use a stitch marker so a stitch marker at least the way i use it is used to mark the first dish of every round some people like to use it to mark the last stitch of every round it’s really up to your personal preference the reason why it’s important to have a stitch marker is that when you’re working in continuous rounds if you’re doing it correctly you won’t be able to tell where one round begins and one round ends so in the event that you make a mistake later on uh you want to not have to undo your entire work and the stitch marker can help you keep track of that it can also help you figure out if you’ve ever made a mistake in a round because you can use this as a starting point to count how many stitches are in the round so to that end this round has six stitches in it i know this because or at least it should have six stitches in it and we can do this uh by checking one two three four five six stitches so if i were to make the next round and let’s say that the next round is uh six increase stitches for a total of twelve stitches i get into position and i take the stitch marker out i remember where this stitch marker was so that i know for sure this is the first stitch of the previous round and now i’m going to crochet the first stitch of round two i’m going to pause here because i don’t want to accidentally forget where this stitch was so when i take my hook out i like to actually make a really big loop just so that there’s no scenario where i accidentally pull on the working yarn and lose that stitch and then you stick the stitch marker under the two top loops and you clip it closed so one thing i want to point out here i use these types of stitch markers and i’ll link to it below the reason why i use these types of stitch markers that look like a baby diaper clip is because there’s no way that this stitch marker can ever fall out like when this piece is in your bag or anything like that there are other designs that are just spirals and i personally feel a little bit worried about how secure those are all right i’m going to fast forward through crocheting the rest of this round so you can see what happens when i get back to this crochet back to the stitch marker all right i’ve completed round two which is six increase stitches which is a total of 12 stitches and there’s two ways or i guess three ways i know this one is that i was counting the second way i could verify this is to count the number of stitches starting from the stitch marker since i know the stitch marker marks the first stitch of my round so let’s do that real quick 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 and then the third way is that i can see that i’ve arrived back at the very first stitch in my round there is no other stitch that i could be putting my hook into to make another stitch in this round so following what i showed you in the previous round to use the stitch marker unlock it remember exactly where it is take it out put your hook in that same spot and make the first stitch of the next round and put it back in and that’s how you use a stitch marker so i also want to show you some tips that work for me when i’m working with a thinner yarn or yarn that has more tension than the one i’m using right now so when you use a stitch marker on yarn that’s thinner sometimes it can distort the yarn a bit so here’s two tips i have to prevent that from happening one you don’t have to use the stitch marker under both top loops you could put it only under the front loop or the back loop and i prefer putting it under the back loop because when you go back later on and crochet more stitches the back loop is definitely going to be hidden from sight another thing i tend to do is actually crochet two stitches in the round before putting the stitch marker in the first stitch and i do two stitches because then this stitch becomes more normal weighted like it would be in the ultimate piece so that there’s less chance the stitch marker is artificially distorting the size of that stitch