....... and this week I had yet another reminder of exactly that!
I have been knitting with wire and beads for many years now, and I have always used my old metal knitting needles but whenever I see anything written about knitting with wire it is always recommending that you use bamboo needles, so last week I invested in 2 sets of bamboo needles, single and double pointed, I thought it was about time!!!
Two days ago I decided to attempt to knit a daffodil brooch and looking through my new sets I chose to use 2.5mm, normally I would use 2 1/4 or 2 3/4 mm metal ones, I don't have 2.5mm metal ones - this is a crucial point!
To start with I used the double pointed needles to make the trumpet, I decided to make the trumpet first as I thought it would be easier to design a petal to fit the size of the trumpet than to make a trumpet to fit the petals.
It wasn't long before I encountered my first problem - the needles were so fine that the wire was cutting through the tips of the needles and slicing through the points sometimes removing slithers of bamboo in the process!
Which meant I had to check which end of the double pointed needle I was using to insert into the stitch every time I switched needle, to make sure I was selecting the strongest tip. This slowed down the making of trumpet but didn't stop work - the trumpet was completed!
Once the trumpet had been made I set too with the knitting of the petals,
all was going smoothly until my fourth petal, one of the needles snapped around a quarter of the length from the point, which left me with a needle the length of a cocktail stick!
As I have already mentioned I don't have any metal needles sized 2.5mm so I couldn't swap to metal, I had no choice I had to continue to knit the remaining two and a half petals on my broken bamboo needle!
I did not give up, I was determined to knit this daffodil, I believed that it was going to make a stunning brooch when completed and so I persevered! I am so pleased I did as this is the finished knitted daffodil brooch!
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As a footnote I also understood why people preferred bamboo over metal, the stitches definitely slide over the the needles smoothly and I should imagine that with larger needles bamboo definitely is the way to go, but it looks as though I am going to have to stick with metal for my finer work
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