subscribeThe issue is the taper on the point of the knitting needle. Turns out, I must have a short taper. My lovely Rosewood needles have a long taper of about an inch. I simply cannot knit with a taper that long. Well, I can knit, but my stitches come out with vast variations in tension. When I finish my first scarf, I'll take pictures and you can see what I'm talking about.
I tend to knit very close to the tip of the needle, so with the long taper I ended up knitting on the taper instead of the straight part of the needle. This made my stitches too tight to slide up onto the body of the needle. When I tried to compensate for that by knitting further back, I had trouble controlling the tension of my yarn which resulted in very uneven stitches.
The bamboo needles have a much shorter taper, about half an inch. This fits my knitting style perfectly. Since I switched to the bamboo needles, my stitches are much more even and my stamina has improved. While knitting with the rosewood needles, my thumb would get very sore after a few hours. With the bamboo needles, my thumb doesn't get sore at all.
So, lesson learned. All my needles from now on will have a short taper.
1 comments:
I've been out of town for a week and a half, and am just now catching up on stuff. You mentioned in another post that you knit too tightly, which is typical of new knitters, and it took me a couple projects to get over it. But that knitting too close to the tip is a big part of it. If you consciously move your action back away from the tip, it will loosen everything up, and actually get easier and faster.
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