It all started with a stray comment from Jon’s mum. She happened to observe that, on their recent trip to London, woollen hats were everywhere. Wouldn’t I fancy having a go? Now, I am not a hat person. I dislike the feeling of my hair getting pushed down, my fringe in my eyes, and my head getting overheated. But I had a look at a few patterns and thought the challenge of using a circular needle may be quite fun as I’ve only used straight needles or double-pointed for cabling. So I headed off to the local Wool Shop and picked up what I thought was a circular needle. Fortunately the shop owner is psychic and guessed what I was really after but I’m still not sure where I went wrong. I asked if it was easy to use and she pulled a face saying “once you get used to them”. Undaunted, I went home and sat down with needle, wool and a pattern for a beret. After a couple of days of knitting, unravelling and knitting again as stitches would multiply of their own volition and I kept losing my place (so that’s why you need markers!) I got to the point of decreasing. Tricky! Couldn’t for the life of me work out what happened when you had less stitches than the length of the needle. By the time I got down to twenty-four stitches, they were hanging off: one circular needle, two double-pointed needles, two straight pins, all of varying sizes. Somehow, I got to the end to cast off and fortunately the ‘shrinking process’ obscured the dodgy stitches, but I couldn’t see how on earth you were supposed to knit the whole hat on one circular needle as stated in the pattern. I googled ‘knitting with circular needles’ and found a wonderful website that showed me exactly where I was going wrong: you need two needles! After casting on, you transfer half the stitches to the other needle, then push the stitches round the needles and knit half a round from the other needle ends until you have knitted a circle and all stitches are on one needle again. Then you transfer half the stitches and continue to follow the same process. Now why couldn’t all those patterns state that you need two needles to stop us novices going mental? Is the technique meant to be a big secret, like belonging to the Magic Circle, and knitters are not meant to divulge to non-knitters? Anyway, I’m more than happy to share my discovery. The website in question is called www.knitknitting.com and it contains lots of good advice. I’m now on my second beret, using two needles and whilst it seems long-winded to be transferring stitches between needles every semi-round you do you get used to it very quickly.
January 31, 2008...3:27 pm
Going around the bend
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