"Your Package Has Arrived"

Remember the Harmony knitting needles I ordered? They have arrIIIiived!!

They are so beautiful!

The laminated layers don't show up on the tiny needles quite as well as I had hoped, but they are still wonderful to look at and handle.

The set includes six sizes...well, kind of. I'm sure you're not surprised to hear that there are several sizing systems for knitting needles. Here in the US there is, of course, the American size, and slowly and fitfully you get metric sizes. You can roughly approximately a needle from one system with a close size of the other, but they are not exact. In the case of very small needles, the US system just isn't refined enough. So this set includes:

Metric = US size

2.00 mm = size 0

2.25 mm = size 1

2.50 mm = size 1

2.75 mm = size 2

3.00 mm = size 2

3.25 mm = size 3

See what's wrong there? And coming from Canada, I have a few UK sized needles mixed in too. That is more confusing because it uses the same numbers as the US system but the sizes aren't the same. (And I think one goes up as the sizes increase, and the other counts down for increasing size.) But somehow, I carry on...

When Troy saw the needles, he commented on their similarity to toothpicks, so that prompted me to make the comparison:

The smallest size (left) certainly is approaching toothpick size.

So what to do with them? I ordered them so I'd have something to work some socks out of this wool I unraveled from a vest from Goodwill:

First I rolled the one skein into a ball and then started to knit a swatch. I was eager enough to try the needles but not quite ready with a pattern to start. And the wool from the front of the vest kept breaking on me as I unwound it. I spliced the pieces together but needed to know whether it would hold up to being reknit.
I'm using the size 1 needles...just teasing...it's the 2.50 mms. 24 stitches.
The swatch is very cute and the wool knit up fine, despite being veeerrry thin in places. I got it cast off tonight and will wash it a little and let it dry to see if it holds up. Then I'm going to search (again) for the sock tutorial on knitting socks from the toe up so I can get something "real" started. My feet are so excited by the promise of green woolly socks. Yum!

But now for some sleep,

christina

PS: EZ says swatches are not wasted, but make very handy pockets. However, I can't quite imagine incorporating a pocket onto my socks...

What my Honey Made Me

Niddy-noddy, niddy-noddy,

two heads and one body.

So can you guess what this is? Yes, it's a niddy-noddy. Can you guess what it's for? Maybe this will help:

You wrap yarn around niddy-noddies to make a neat skein with consistently sized wraps. This one makes a 2 meter loop. So when I finish wrapping the yarn onto a skein I can count the wraps and then approximate the length of yarn that I have. Pretty ingenious, eh?

As soon as I read of it, and saw how easy it is to make, I had to have one! Especially for all the sweaters I just salvaged from Goodwill. I sent an email to my honey and that night I had one waiting for me when I got home. Sometimes I just feel spoiled.

I already had all this wool:

from this sweater  which looks like this  close up.

Wrapping onto the niddy-noddy sure beats wrapping it onto my footstool as I had been doing.

It also will make it easier to reuse or sell the yarn as I'll know my total yardage. In this case, since I already had this stuff wrapped into skeins, I just wound one of them onto the niddy-noddy so I could count the wraps, then weighed it, and then estimated the length of the rest of the skeins from that.

When I weighed all the skeins and estimated the lengths, I had a total of 357 grams / 587 meters. Not bad. It won't make another sweater, but it's a substantial amount.

From the vest in the previous post, I got 121 grams / 543 meters. I'm still hoping to make socks out of it, but they might be short socks! Here are the two skeins (one from the back, one from the front.

I haven't washed or treated these skeins. You can see how the one I wrapped over the footstool is still very kinked from being knitted. The other skein was wrapped around the niddy-noddy (a little tighter) and tightly twisted into a skein. I think if I unwrapped it, it would still be kinky, but not like the other one.

And speaking of socks, I ordered the Harmony knitting needles I've been wanting for a while now. Troy told me to quit wishing and start clicking. (I ordered online.) I really like working with double pointed needles, and with wooden needles, and these are really beautiful, and supposed to be stronger than bamboo.  I can't wait. I went ahead and got the whole sock set which, I think, is 6 sizes (6 6-inch needles of each size). Woo hoo!