The friend­ly folks at Yarn Cana­da sent me a Denise2Go knit­ting set to review :D

So very gen­er­ous of them! Clear­ly I was very excit­ed, and start­ed a cou­ple of projects to try it out :D

The knit­ting kit that I chose comes with 4 pairs of nee­dles (6.5mm-10mm) and 3 cords of dif­fer­ent length­s (14″, 16″, 19″), and they’re inter­change­able! It also comes with a 6.5mm cro­chet hook (handy to have in a knit­ting kit for weav­ing in ends, pick­ing up stitch­es, adding cro­chet details, or tak­ing up cro­chet­ing if one does­n’t already cro­chet…), 2 end but­tons and a con­nec­tor (I’ll show you what they do in a bit).

The cord locks into the end of the nee­dle with a half turn and a click. And we’re ready to knit!

I’m super excit­ed about the cords. Since I usu­al­ly avoid projects that work in the round, I don’t have a lot of cir­cu­lar nee­dles, but I do need them for knit­ting col­lars (even though I try to avoid knit­ting those in the round as well), and for large projects. This is where the con­nec­tor is very useful.

I could link two cords togeth­er to make a super long cord! Ini­tial­ly I had just con­nect­ed the cords for a pho­to, but as my knit­ting grew I real­ized that with­out the cord con­nec­tor I would­n’t have been able to con­tin­ue :S (I’ve nev­er knit­ted any­thing this large before).

The plas­tic is kind of stiff when it’s new, and it’s a tiny piece, so I found it a bit hard to to grip and turn some pieces in place, but wide elas­tic bands (from buy­ing broc­coli :D) saved the day.

I also won­dered about the cords becom­ing dis­con­nect­ed in the mid­dle of knit­ting. So far it’s been fine, every­thing seemed secure. The cord only came off the con­nec­tor once when I acci­den­tal­ly turned it while push­ing the stitch­es forward.

And the end but­tons! They can turn cir­cu­lar nee­dles into “straight” needles.

All in all I do pre­fer actu­al straight nee­dles, because I can rest them on my fore­arm­s as I knit, and I find that eas­i­er on my wrists. But have you seen my bin of nee­dles? I will spare you the headache and won’t show you, but it’s a giant mess! The good thing about this kit is that it wraps up in a neat bun­dle, and it’s orga­nized and small and easy to store. And the case is hand­made! Maybe I should look into mak­ing cas­es for all my oth­er needles…

Yarn Cana­da also car­ries a cro­chet kit and a knit­ting kit with small­er nee­dles, you can find them here :) They also car­ry a wide vari­ety of yarn, with free ship­ping options. I’ve nev­er bought yarn online before, but might give this a try if I already know the look and feel of the yarn I want.

And now I’m off to the yarn shop! :D Hap­py Wednes­day, everyone!