Knitting Needles - It's Personal!

Ask any random five knitters which needles are the best and you'll get five or more different answers.

For the non-knitters, needles come in a couple of styles, with different uses for various projects.  The style people are most often introduced to first are straight needles.  They come in various lengths and materials.  The first needles I ever had were a gift from my Aunty June.  They were metal and about 14 inches long.   They were silver, shiny and slippery.  

In my 50's I developed arthritis in my hands.  It got bad enough that I did some research to see what I could do to prevent the constant ache I got from doing various things.  One thing I had noticed was that holding metal needles hurt, not because they were bad needles but they felt cool to the touch all the time.  The fact that they were slippery made me grip things tighter, which caused aching later in the day.  So bye-bye metal needles.  Now I have bamboo straight needles, and a few sets of plastic needles.

Next come double pointed needles, or DPNs.  These are great for knitting things in the round, like socks or sometimes sweater sleeves.  They'll be in sets of four or five or six, and anywhere from four to seven inches long.  The fancy type has a metal tip with a plastic or wooden barrel.  I knit my socks on dpns,

although I have flirted with other methods.  Like magic loop, or two circs.  But more on that later.

Sets of four plastic needles in various sizes.

                                            

Knit Picks Wood Needles in colors that change by size.  Fun!

The last type of needle in my collection is the circular needle, also known as the curly needles by my grands.  They are needles connected by cables, and come in lengths from nine inches to 40 inches, and can either be fixed or interchangeable.  Fixed is as you would expect permanently connected.

Interchangeable have ends that come off, and various cable lengths that can make any of a gazillion combinations of needle size.  This shows what normally come with an interchangeable set:  Ends, cord, caps and pins. 

The pins are little wires to tighten the ends of these interchangeables.  That prevents the disaster of lost stitches when the end comes off because it was too loose!  And the black circular items are caps that  make the configuration of one end and one cord into the equivalent of a straight needle.  They prevent lost stitches.

Interchangeable needles are expensive when you buy the whole set, but probably cheaper than the total price of the equivalent number of fixed needles you'd have to buy to make everything you can make from the set.

I have two interchangeable sets.  One is bamboo from Clover.  I like them and use them a lot.  The one drawback as I see it is that they don't lock so the size five ends tend to unscrew and I have to tighten them periodically.  Why only the fives is a mystery.  I also have a set of Knit Picks wood needles with a longer end piece.  Their longer length makes them reach out past the heel of my hands when I knit. This is more comfortable for me. They lock and stay secure.  I love them and use them for nearly every sweater project I start.

That is my dissertation on knitting needles!  There are reasons to use each type for various projects, and every knitter has his or her preference.  Some day I may tell this blog about my sock knitting adventures, but you can learn more from the experts than I could tell you.  My advice?  Take a little trip to your local yarn shop and stand in front of the needle display.  Start a conversation with anyone who comes to visit you there.  Listen, learn, absorb.  Then try some!

Knit on...

Blame It On the Yarn Harlot...

 Ha ha!  Not really, but maybe...

So if you're reading this you know that I have all of the fiber addictions.  Fabric.  Yarn.  Thread.  Beads and buttons and patterns and rulers and all things crafty.  Paper too.  Cards and stationery dating back to when people used to write actual letters and send actual cards.  

But as far as my yarn went, I shopped at the chain stores and bought the most inexpensive yarn I could find.  My mother and I were Red Heart fans.  NOT that there's anything wrong with that! It comes in lots of great colors, it feels nice in your hands, and it's readily available in all sorts of quantities.

But when in my sewing life I came across American Sewing Guild and was introduced to the concept of using the best materials you can afford, and saw what a difference it made in the things I was making, well, that sort of life-altering concept can transform you.

I researched and found a local yarn shop or two in my area.  A couple of them have since closed but my favorite one, Cream City Yarn, is still in business.  It's a tiny little shop with lots of personality.  It's also where I learned to knit socks the right way(s) and where I learned to do colorwork.

I cannot remember exactly how or when I stumbled across a blog called Yarnharlot.ca on the web.  Probably more than a decade ago... but who's counting?  Anyway, she is Stephanie McPhee, a Canadian knitter of famous proportions, who excels at explaining things to people in clear and concise language which in turn makes them better knitters.  You can tell I'm a fan, right? 

After discovering the blog, I also discovered she's a writer, and I bought and devoured many of her books.  AND she teaches knitting!!  I'll bet you could see that coming.

She has taught (before Covid) at knitting conferences, some of which she runs with friends in Canada. I narrowly missed getting into a class before I retired (not quick enough to react before they were full...)  And now, she teachings via the Web on a site called Patreon, to which you can subscribe during this not-getting-together-too-much time.  I subscribed.  After all, what else was there to do besides watch bad TV and YouTube on any subject known to man and some unknown (and should remain so!)

Also about this same time I discovered Roxanne Richardson, who is a Master Knitter and very knowledgeable and who has a YouTube Channel and a Ravelry thread called Rox Rocks.  Which led me to Clara Parkes and Suzanne Bryant and Barbara Knits and, well, you can see where this is going.

ANYWAY, back to blaming.  These knitters have one thing in common.  They know a LOT about yarn.  Especially Stephanie and Clara.  Clara may be the and I mean capital THE yarn expert.  She now has a place called the Wool Channel.  A. Maze. Ing.

Watching Patreon after reading the yarnharlot blog for years changed my yarn shopping a bit.  I started buying better quality natural fiber yarn, and most of that yarn comes in hanks.  This is a different sort of configuration than they have at the chains.  You need EQUIPMENT!  

You can see that this nicely wound hank of Malabrigo yarn is lovely, but if you tried to knit directly from it, Tangle City.  Take my word for it and don't even try.

You can untwist the hank and hang it over the back of a chair if you want.  In the 'olden days', a child or spouse might be convinced to hold the skein while you wound the up to 500 yards of it into balls for knitting.  Therefore, a yarn winder is required.  Well, not required, but it speeds up the process.  The winder creates what's called a cake (see the top of the picture, the blob in red) which can be used from the outside or from the inside.  A cake tends not to roll away from you or attract your cat.

Using the winder from yarn slung over the back of a chair was somewhat challenging, although I did that for a while.  I graduated to winding from chair to ball by hand, and then winding from ball to cake. (You put the ball in a box or a bowl to keep it from escaping.)  That then, led to finding an alternative to the back of a chair, since my spouse/children/grandchildren were not available for the holding.  My aunt had a yarn swift, made for her by my uncle, who was also unavailable for holding the yarn.  

I searched sites for something manageable both in size and in price.  I found this type.  *It should be noted here that my local yarn shop will wind anything that I purchase there at no additional cost, and so will some on-line dealers although some have a winding fee and many do not choose to do that.

My swift is easy to assemble, use and disassemble, and stores in a flat box in my closet.

The next thing I wanted was a yarn bowl.  It holds a ball or a cake, and the yarn goes from the slit on the side to your needles.  Control is gained, and cats are discouraged.   I had my eye on this shape below for so long... and finally one Christmas my son bought me one.  Until then, I'd used a number of things, including a plain old bowl, a flower pot and an orange juice carton with the side cut out.

The bowl is nicer.  But sometimes you're knitting more than one project.  (What?  You're a monogamous knitter?  OK... skip this part.)  So I became a collector of nice yarn bowls, and I now have, ummm, more than two.

So in my yarn collection I now have yarn, a winder (or two), alpaca yarn, one swift, a couple of bowls, wool yarn, many different types of needles (which might be a future post), also a million knitting markers of different types, cashmere yarn, knitting gauge tools, cotton yarn,, needles gauge tools, mohair yarn, patterns, a Ravelry account where I keep a stash list more or less current, and crochet hooks.  I subscribe to several favorite YouTube channels and a have couple of Patreons I follow.  

My youngest grand has taken a lot of my chain store yarn and is learning to crochet.  She's doing great and her great-grandma would be very proud, as am I.

I also at some point bought a hand-made yarn spindle.  It works fine for cakes but not for balls.  As you knit from the outside of the cake, the spindle turns and viola! No yarn tangles!

If Stephanie McPhee hadn't explained to me the various types of things in her stash, and why to choose one fiber over another, would I have all of this stuff?  Well, probably yes, but it would not have the quality or the value to my knitting that it does if I had not learned the whys and the wherefores.  

So, Steph and Rox and Clara and all the rest, I'm not so much blaming you as showing you homage as I knit on wool and blends and yes, sometimes even my beloved Red Heart.

Knit on...