needle testing fun

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

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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!

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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!

 

4 thoughts on “needle testing fun

  1. I have a dou­ble set of Denise’s cro­chet hooks that I use for Tunisian and/or dou­ble end­ed cro­chet. They’re won­der­ful! I had one con­nec­tor that had a minor defect and would come undone occa­sion­al­ly. They sent me two replace­ments for free! 

    I man­aged to talk my cro­chet cohort into get­ting a set for her­self because she does a lot of Tunisian cro­chet. She was adamant about using these bam­boo ones she liked, but com­plained about because there weren’t a lot of cable options. Plus she did­n’t want plas­tic. I lent her mine and she became a total con­vert! She got her­self a set short­ly there­after! They’re fabulous!

  2. these real­ly are fab­u­lous, it’s a great invest­ment! i love the smooth con­nec­tion and the stitch­es don’t get caught between the nee­dle and the cable, which some­times hap­pens with real­ly inex­pen­sive cir­cu­lar nee­dles (i learned it the hard way, had to cut the cable to res­cue the yarn! :S). oooh, what is dou­ble end­ed crochet?

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