One of my sister's showed me this great trick - knitting on circular needles instead of double pointed needles. Yes! It works great for very small circumfrances - I did this entire sleeve - with multiple colors at the cuff - using circular needles - shorter ones at the narrower part and then switching over to longer ones as the sleeve got wider. OK - so I am at the very top of this sleeve where it is the wide part, but it should still give you a good idea... hopefully. *
You feed some stitches onto the left needle and "bend" the loopy part of the needle to feed the other stitches back over to the right - you need to do this when you don't have enough stitches to go around - bending and feeding those extra stitches not yet on the knitting part of the needle over to the right will give you the slack you need. Knit the stitches on your left needle over to the right.
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Push all the stitches on the right needle all the way over to the right - you probably will have to pull the tip of the right needle to get the stitches over there - this will at the same time pull the left needle back toward the remaining stitches that need to be knit. Be careful not to pull the left needle through the stitches! In other words - be careful not to drop the stitches as you pull the needle through.
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Now you needles are in position again to start the process over.
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The best part - your stitch marker never falls off the back of a dpn! All you sock knitters out there might want to give this method a whirl - just get a short circular needle because one that is very long will be too long to feed the stitches around. I am not sure those snap on/snap off connector needles would hold up to the bending part because I don't have those kind of needles.
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So - here is a photo of my knitting basket - and lookie there - it is almost full! That would be full of knitting - not full of balls of yarn. Yup, after FOUR years, I am on the final sleeve for this sweater and that sleeve is just a few more rows away from being done!!! Obviously it is a pick up every now and then or once in a blue moon project for me. But, I did start this last sleeve the end of April and have been pretty good about doing 5 rows here and there this summer and it looks like I might actually finish this sweater in time to wear THIS winter. Yippee!!! Stay tuned for a photo of the finished sweater, I just can't promise when that will be.
5 comments:
Hey! You knit!! Can't wait to see yours sweater this winter!!
I have tried the technique of knitting 2 socks on one 40" circular needles. For me, it was very frustrating as you are working from each end of the skein and there was only about 4" of free yarn to work with as the rest would just twist back onto itself and the other strand.
So tonight I am taking my second class in knitting one sock on two circular needles. Once I switched to bamboo needles it started to go just fine. I'm not very fast with this technique but then I'm just learning.
Ah, but dpn's will always be my favorite needle for socks, I believe. I can get a pair of socks finished in about a week of evening knitting.
Can't wait to see your finished sweater. Since it's been on the needles for so long, I assume it's not for Little Boy? Or is it?
Glad the circular needle works for you. I'm not a knitter, but circular sounds better than pointy.
That's the ONE thing I really haven't pursued in the needle-arts world... am I missing something? I can't wait to see the lovely finished product.
cool...my last sweater was on circular needles and I really enjoyed using them-way to keep at this project!
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