Stitch markers

[untonuggan]

I realize I'm probably opening up a whole kettle of fish by asking this, but I am new to knitting and wonder whether it's worth it to bother buying stitch markers. Right now I'm just using a loop of a contrasting scrap yarn as a stitch marker. It can be a little cumbersome, but I don't have to worry about losing it (can always get more small bits of yarn). Annoyingly, the acrylic yarns tend to fray a bit.

I've read that it's much smoother and faster to use the commercially made stitch markers, but I do wonder (a) if that is just slick marketing, (b) about the wasted plastic/shipping/processing costs to the environment, (c) about what happens when I lose the expensive little things.

Thoughts?

UPDATE: Thanks for all the suggestions and input, folks! I think I will go crazy if I try to respond to every reply, so I'll just say thanks here!

Comments

[jenett]

I actually find the slightly different weight of simple/small stitchmarkers very handy. My current project is one of the Folk Shawls book shawls (six stitch repeats). I do a stitch marker every 2 repeats, plus to help me track the stuff on the ends.

That way, when I get distracted by something (I usually watch TV-or-movie-like things while knitting) I don't have to work back very far to figure out where I was. (And I started knitting while I was having lots of brain fog issues, so the less mental work I had to do, the more likely I was to keep knitting.)

I've tried one of the KnitPicks plastic ones, but the ones I really like are these ones They're a soft bendable plastic, so they have a nice give to them.

I do drop them occasionally, but it's more likely I tip over the box (which I've learned how to avoid) than that I lose one off the needle. I got several sets, so even if I lose some, there's still plenty to work with, and I use the different colors to make it easy to see where the start of the front side is, etc. (They're a little over $5 for 27, so not too pricy for something I reuse a lot.)

I also have a set of bigger heavy ones with stones that I like for simpler patterns (where I'm just marking the center stitch, or something like that.)