The good, the bad and the ugly

The last time I posted about my knitting, I mentioned how much I am enjoying the fact that this is something totally new to me, so there is lots to learn. Perhaps I should have been careful what I wished for, as this week has involved a lot of learning!

My knitting needle bag contains my mum's and grandmothers' needle collections, assorted cast offs (no pun intended) from other people, and some which I have bought for specific projects.

Inside my knitting needle bag

They are a mix of old and new sizes, mostly metal, a few plastic. Long-gone brand names like Milward and Aero feature heavily. For the most part, I have just used whatever pair I have found in there which are the right size and length.

My Wondrellas have been knitted on straight metal needles, with the sleeves done on circular metal needles of different lengths.

Wondrella needles

My Dahlia shawl started on straight metal needles, and quickly moved to straight bamboo which gave better control of the yarn. When the rows got too long for straight needles, I discovered interchangeable circular needles, in this case beech Basix from KnitPro.

Dahlia needles

I started Confidette on straight metal needles as normal, but eventually it was easier to switch to a circular needle. The pattern requires a longer circular needle for working the border than I had, so I bought this in Edinburgh and switched to it straight away.

This didn't feel very zingy to me

Sorry KnitPro, but I just couldn't get on with this at all. Even though I use metal needles most of the time, these ones just made my hands cramp up. Very odd.

My local fabric and wool shop has recently got a few interchangeable wood needles in, so once I felt well enough to venture out, I bought these.

These looked promising

The wooden tips were much more comfortable to use, and things were progressing nicely, until . . .

Aaargh!

This photograph was taken after I had managed to run an emergency lifeline through what I hoped was most of the dropped stitches. At some point the tip had detached from the cable, and I had been blithely knitting stitches which simply fell off the back end of the tip. About 60 stitches on a row of 210 were just hanging loose.

I did consider just frogging back to the lifeline below, but decided that I would at least try to save it. I had to transfer the remaining stitches off the tip and onto the lifeline, then reattach the tip to the cable and try to transfer the stitches back onto the needle from the lifeline.

Some of the stitches I had only caught partially or not at all, and for these I had to unravel them to the next row down and pick them up with a crochet hook. Once I had rescued all the stitches, I decided to unpick the row stitch by stitch and reknit it, to make absolutely certain that everything was properly in place. Needless to say all this took quite some time, but it did work.

Unsurprisingly, after all that, I wasn't very confident about continuing to use these needles. It was hard to photograph, but the thread for screwing in the cable seems to start quite a long way down the tip, so I'm not sure how well the two are fastened together.

The start of the screw thread is just visible right at the bottom

I turned to Ewe and Ply, who saved the day by speedily sending out a set of KnitPro Ginger tips and a cable. Like the Basix, these use a key to make sure that the tip is properly attached, and they are really comfortable to knit with.

Back on track

So this week I have learned that not all knitting needles are created equal, and that there's more to it than just grabbing the first pair of the right size from my bag. On the plus side, I'm now a fair bit more confident in my fixing skills if something goes wrong.