Small, bright, plastic thingies

I had never heard of stitch markers before I entered the knitting world on Internet. If I needed to mark stitches, I used contrast coloured scrap yarn. And was happy with that. But then I saw one beautiful stitch marker after the other, and became a little envious. It looked so simple and elegant - "place marker", in stead of looking for scrap yarn (that's not hard to find in my house, though..) Anyway, I finally have my own stitch markers! I first saw them on Tikru's blog. And then made my first Etsy purchase, from Succaplokki. I have considered it before, but most sellers are in the US, which means unreasonably high shipping cost for some small stitch markers. Buying from a neighbouring country like Finland is cheaper. And the markers are lovely.

When I was a kid, we also had these plastic beads. But I never saw those small spiky tables to make patterns on. I know I would have loved that! None of my boys have accepted my offers to teach them to knit or crochet, but they've done a lot of beading, so they must have inherited something..