I can remember when I first saw someone knitting in the round with circular needles, I couldn’t work out what was happening!
The thought of knitting with circular needles can feel intimidating at first, but there are lots of benefits to knitting with circular needles – either to use them to knit in the round, or to use them to knit flat.
There are 2 reasons I like knitting projects in the round:
1) to achieve stocking stitch on flat needles, we have to knit one row, purl one row and so on, because we alternate between having the right side to the front and then the wrong side is to the front. But when knitting in the round, only the right side is ever at the front as we knit, therefore we only need to work the knit stitch to achieve stocking stitch.
2) very little sewing up! There are no seams or joins to sew up as we’re working a tube of knitting. The only ends we need to sew in are the cast on tail and the snipped working yarn when we’ve finished.
Of course, not all projects can be knit in the round and have to be worked flat and seamed, but you can still use a set of circular needles to knit with, you just use them as though they were straight needles.
I cover all of this and more in the following tutorials.
The thought of knitting with circular needles can feel intimidating at first, but there are lots of benefits to knitting with circular needles – either to use them to knit in the round, or to use them to knit flat.
There are 2 reasons I like knitting projects in the round:
1) to achieve stocking stitch on flat needles, we have to knit one row, purl one row and so on, because we alternate between having the right side to the front and then the wrong side is to the front. But when knitting in the round, only the right side is ever at the front as we knit, therefore we only need to work the knit stitch to achieve stocking stitch.
2) very little sewing up! There are no seams or joins to sew up as we’re working a tube of knitting. The only ends we need to sew in are the cast on tail and the snipped working yarn when we’ve finished.
Of course, not all projects can be knit in the round and have to be worked flat and seamed, but you can still use a set of circular needles to knit with, you just use them as though they were straight needles.
I cover all of this and more in the following tutorials.
My advice is to keep an open mind about using circular needles – they’re not nearly as scary as they might first seem!
