Knitting Needles

If you’re looking to get started, I’d recommend checking out my Getting Started post for which needles to get. If you’ve been knitting a while and are looking to move forward in purchasing another pair of needles for a project then you’re in the right place.

The size of needle you need will depend on the guage needed for the pattern. Your pattern may not tell you the specific needle size as guage is obtained differently per knitter. This means you might need a size down or up from what the pattern writer used to obtain guage.

Straight Needles – These are best for items “worked flat”; think scarves. You could potentially use them for making flat pieces of work that you later sew into a tube for sleeves or other parts of a garment.

Circular Needles – Can be used to knit items “worked flat” or “in-the-round” for tubular items such as beanies, gloves, sweaters, etc. These are two needles connected with a cable and can be either “Fixed” or “interchangable” meaning the cable is permanently connected or able to be swapped out with another cable length to connect the needles. Interchangable cables are not necessarily interchangable across brands, so do keep that in mind!

The length of cable needed between your needles will vary depending on your project and techniques you use for it.

Something else to consider when picking out your needles is the join. Some older needles I used to have had an angled join. For the life of me I cannot figure out when that would be helpful. It always disruppted the flow of working through the round, which generally has a rythm of just keep knitting rather than knit and stop to reposition the work on the needle because of this weird angled join. If it’s something that works for you, great! But I haven’t met a knitter that swore by it. ;) My preference would be a smooth join that is not angled. If you have made friends with other knitters, see if you can sample a pair they have to get a better idea of how joins differe between needle brands.

Double Pointed Needles (DPNs) – These are useful for tubular things that don’t require a lot of stitches such as a cuff of a sweater sleeve or the crown of a beanie. There are techniques such as Magic Loop that can be used with circular needles that may render DPNs something you don’t need. However, it is a personal preference!

Needle Material There are aluminium, carbon fiber, bamboo, wood, and possibly more types of materials that I haven’t discovered yet!

Each of these material types will have an impact on your knitting. In general, a metal needle will be slippery which could be helpful if you are a tight knitter (where your stitches hug the needle) or you’re working with a type of yarn that may not slide as easily. After that, I feel that it boils down to preference.