After plenty of knitting and crocheting over Christmas I decided to make it my new year's resolution to carry on learning as many new techniques as I can in both needlecrafts.
For a long time I'd had this pair of circular needles kicking around and had never used them, purely because they were a bit 'long' for casting on anything with a fairly small circumference. But thanks to a Mastodon buddy (who was actually one of the reasons I took up Crochet and Knitting in the first place, thanks Chris!) I was tipped off about the Magic Loop technique for using a larger circular needle to knit smaller circumference items.
I've knitted in the round before, but usually on a set of circular needles that are TINY and really only suitable for doing tiny / thin yarn projects. But I love me a bit of chunky yarn, and wanted to scale things up a bit and finally get the use of those needles.
Enter the magic loop technique, beautifully described here: Magic Loop Technique: How To Knit in the Round Using a Single Long Circular Needle – tin can knits
It looks complicated at first but basically you're dividing your stitches in half, leaving a nice long loop of your circular needle in the middle to work around. The trickiest part is joining the initial stitches (you always cast on 1 more stitch than you need to compensate for this).
Once I'd started the first few rows, it began to form the nice seamless 'tube' of knitted yarn I was hoping for. It wasn't actually too bad sliding the stitches to the 'working' needle every time. The other issue I had was that the first stitch had a habit of unravelling (the last stitch cast on actually) so I had to keep an eye on the trailing yarn from my usual long tail cast on to avoid this (lazy cast on wouldn't work for me at all, probably why I've never got on with this technique previously!)
Scaling up or scaling down the number of stitches was easier than I thought as well, so the smallest circumference I've managed to knit with this technique is glove-finger size (about 10-12 stitches) and can definitely see why people are fans of this technique.
Elsewhere in knitting, I picked up some double pointed needles. Try as I might, this is a technique that's eluded me so far. I just cannot get those durned things to stay together in order to knit round the four needles to produce anything as neat as I can with circular needles and the technique above. Knitting purists scoff and sniff at the magic loop / circular needles technique but I've never understood why folk have to berate newcomers to needlecrafts when they take an easier option (it's probably not helped by the fact that I bought steel DPs, should've gone for bamboo ones.
My other new year's resolution is to learn tunisian crochet but it's been surprisingly difficult to track down a tunisian crochet hook that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. But track down I will!
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