Making Shorter Straight Needles

Posted on March 20th, 2009, by Nuri

I dislike knitting with needles that are longer than the project I’m working on is wide. The ends stick out and bump into things. It’s especially bad if I’m sitting in a chair with arms…every stitch takes extra effort.

Most of my straight needles are quite long. This, of course, is great when knitting something wide. However, things like scarves, lace wraps, and other 50-or-less-stitches-per-row projects really don’t require all that extra length.

I learned to knit at an SCA Event called University. There was a class on beginner knitting. For a small fee, the instructor graciously provided a ball of cotton yarn, two needles, and a wonderfully thorough handout detailing the basics (with pictures!). The genius part? The needles were two DPNs, each with a rubber band wrapped around one end. I didn’t appreciate how awesome this was at the time, but with a little more experience I know that it was both cheaper for her to supply (2 sets of DPNs would service 5 beginners!) and easier for us newbies to manipulate. This is almost exactly the same kit (with acrylic instead of cotton) that I recently gave to a friend when teaching her to knit, and I firmly believe that having shorter needles makes learning to knit quite a bit easier.

I was having this problem with my lace wrap. I checked my needle drawer, and lo and behold, I had a set of size 8 bamboo DPNs! With a few rubber bands to keep the stitches from slipping off the end, I had made myself a set of short needles that were exactly the right width for my lace project. A third rubber band serves to keep the needles together and keep stitches from slipping off while in transit.

short

I should have done this a week ago! This project is much more enjoyable now.

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Dyet Yarns blog posts by Adrian "Nuri" Steinhauer are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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  1. magpiewench Says:
    March 27th, 2009 at 11:35 am

    Brilliant!!!! was that Susanna? if so, yeah, she’s brilliant, too!

    Now I know what to do with all the stray DPNs I seem to have :)

    <3

  2. Nuri Says:
    March 27th, 2009 at 12:55 pm

    Oh man, it was like 5 years ago. I have no idea who the teacher was! I vividly remember the classroom, the desk I was sitting at, and what I was doing, but not the teacher’s name.

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