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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.