Wool craft

Here are some hints for knitting and crochet when you are blind or vision impaired. The emphasis is on using your sense of touch, rather than relying on sight. However, if you do have some useful vision, you can also apply the " bigger, bolder, brighter " principles to your wool craft.

Give yourself time to practise your knitting or crochet. Start slowly with simple items and move onto harder things as you build your confidence.

On this page:

• Enhancing Your Vision Using the Bigger, Bolder, Brighter Principles
• Some Hints From Experienced Knitters and Crocheters
• Keeping Count of Rows and Stitches
• Identifying Different Plys and Colours
• Dropped Stitches
• Adaptive Equipment
• Share our vision
• Contact Us

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Enhancing Your Vision Using the Bigger, Bolder, Brighter Principles

Bigger

Can things be magnified or made larger and easier to see or handle? Use thicker ply wool and larger hooks or needles just until you get used to knitting or crochet again. Enlarge your knitting patterns to make them easier to see. Use a tape measure with large numbers on it.

Bolder

Can you use colour contrast to make your work easier to see? Make sure you have good colour contrast between the hook or needle and the wool. Use coloured needles that contrast with the colour of your wool. For example, if you are crocheting with a light coloured wool, use dark coloured hooks. Coloured hooks and needles are available at most craft shops and large department stores. Also think about the surface on which you're working. If you have light wool, put a dark towel over your lap to enhance the contrast and vice versa with dark wool.

Brighter

Make sure you have good, direct lighting over your work. This could be an adjustable desk lamp focussed directly onto your knitting or crochet. To reduce the glare, make sure the light is directed below your eye level. You could also make use of natural light by working near a window (keep your back to the window to minimise glare).

Some Hints From Experienced Knitters and Crocheters

• Take time to learn the feel of your stitches. Identify them by where the loops are for each type of stitch. "Knit" stitches have the loop on the side away from you. "Pearl" stitches have the loop on the side closest to you.
• When you knit, hold the needles close to the point as this gives you more control over your work.
• Needles that have a good point on them reduce the problem of splitting yarn and missing stitches.
• Avoid using mohair wool or any yarn that splits easily.
• Avoid lacey patterns. Dense patterns such as aran patterns are easier to feel, and keep track of, in your garment.
• Keep your ball of wool in a container or bag to stop it from tangling or running away.
• Steel bent cable needles are useful for any cable knitting eg. when using aran patterns. These needles are available from knitting shops.

Keeping Count of Rows and Stitches

As each row is completed, place a counter eg button or match inside a container and then count them when needed.

Some people use a cribbage board to keep track of rows. Others use a small abacus.

Identifying Different Plys and Colours

People often work out their own systems to identify plys and colours. Some of these are listed:

• You might like to keep all wool of one particular ply in the one bag.
• You can put different shaped or textured indicators (eg safety pins) on the wool labels to verify the colour of the wool you are using.
• Some people keep different coloured wool in different textured bags. For example, their red wool is kept in a plastic bag, blue wool in a paper bag and white wool in a fabric bag.
• Some people prefer to work in all one colour so they don't have to worry about counting rows to change colours or identifying different colours.
• People with some remaining vision, use sharply contrasting colours eg white and black or red and white so it is easier to tell where they are up to.
• Some people work with only one or two particular plys to save trying to identify the thicknesses of wool.

Dropped Stitches

If you have dropped a stitch, unpick your work stitch by stitch to go back to the dropped stitch. Don't undo whole rows at a time.

Adaptive Equipment

Rubber stoppers are available from wool and craft shops. These stop your stitches falling off the point of your needle and hold your needles in place when you put your work away.

Needle gauges are available in wool shops and are used to measure needle sizes. You might like to put identifying marks on sizes used most often. There is no needle gauge available for crochet needles as there is less variation in sizes.

Instead of worrying about needle size, some people simply use two needle sizes for all their work and only use maybe two wool thicknesses as well eg 5 and 8 ply.

Tactile tape measures, either imperial or metric, are available from Vision Australia.

Safety pins or large coloured-head pins are easy to feel when placed as line markers or for tacking.

This page last updated: 24 August 2009

Copyright © 2007 Vision Australia.