Circular & Double Pointed Knitting Needles

Video Transcript

"Hi, I’m Kelsey. I’ve been knitting for 10 years and I’m a member of several knitting organizations, and today I’m going to talk about circular needles. Most knitting is done flat, back and forth on straight needles, but occasionally you want to knit something in the round in a spiral. When you do that you’re going to need either circular or double pointed needles. Circular needles, like straight and other kind of needles come in three basic materials. You can find wood, metal, and plastic. Again, wood is often a little more expensive. Metal and plastic can bee cheaper although not always. That doesn’t means they are any worse, they offer their own benefits and disadvantages. The wood is nice, one nice thing about wood is that wooden needles warm to the touch and are light. A thing to watch out for with wood is the joint between the needle part, which is where you are knitting, and the connecter which is where the stitches are held. If the joint isn’t smooth and isn’t well made it can catch and really get in the way of your knitting. This is often a little less of a problem in plastic because it’s all made of one material, but it can be just as bad if you are dealing with cheaper quality needles. Metal, also a problem. One nice thing about metal is they work up a lot faster, which can be a benefit in circular knitting. These are Atti-Turbos, they’re from Germany and they’re much more expensive than wood or plastic needles. But they knit incredibly quickly, which is really nice. Another thing to think about when you’re buying circular needles is the length. This has to do with what project you’re doing. You can have really short needles like this, you can have medium ones like this, and then you can have really long ones. This is the shortest circular needle available, its about 16” and its good for hats and socks and that sort of thing. You can’t really get much shorter than this without getting cramped. You might use a longer length for something like a sweater, and a really long length for something like an afghan. Keep in mind that you can work back and forth with circular needles which is an advantage when you are dealing with a lot of stitches with like a blanket because they are held on this long bit. When you are knitting with your circular needles, and say you’re doing something like a hat with a decreased number of stitches or a sock which has a small diameter, at a certain point it’s not going to be possible to use this anymore because you’re going to need to make something with a diameter smaller than this. At that point you’re going to need to switch over to double pointed needles. Double pointed needles are another tool for working knitting in the round. They come in sets of 4 or 5. The look like this, exactly as they’re called, double pointed. They also come in wood metal or plastic. How they work is you cast onto your stitches, a portion of your stitches, on each needle and then connect them. Then you use the spare needle to knit them, so you are always working with two needles, it just keeps them split up like that. One thing to consider with circular needles, one nice thing about them, is that many companies offer interchangeable sets of needles so that you can buy a set that has say 12 different sizes of needles without the connectors and then connectors that pull in and out. That allows you to have a really wide variety of needle sizes and circular lengths which is nice. Those come in everything from a plastic set which can be as cheap as $30-40, to a wooden set which can run upwards of $100. "