Quicksilver and the Importance of Good Knitting Needles

I’m making very good progress on my Quicksilver. I never thought I’d say this, but I can’t wait to block it. I have it crammed on a very short circular needle right now, so I can’t get a sense of what its completed size will be, and I want to see the mesh sections open up and bloom a bit.

No major hitches, but there were a couple more instances when I dropped a stitch and had to do a little tinking and a little detective work to fix it. Then, I thought I’d dropped a stitch, so went through the process of fixing it…only to realize that I had done it right in the first place. So I went back and fixed my fix. That might have been annoying, but tinking back and really looking at the structure of knitting has been the best way over the years for me to begin to get a better sense of how the stitches work together to create a fabric, and what tension in one area does to the rest. Like any good engineer, I have to take something apart and put it back together in order to fully understand it.

I have it crammed onto a shorter needle because my next longest needle in that size is some ancient plastic creation that I’m not thrilled about working with. The one I have it one now is an Addi lace circular. I like that much better than the ancient plastic one, but I’m finding it’s not the ideal needle I thought it would be. I bought it recently because I needed one in that size. I would probably have gotten the regular Addis but the person at the store told me about the lace tips. For those not in the know, Addi Turbos are notoriously sleek, slick and quick needles that knitters tend to either love or hate. I love them. I thought it would be awesome to have that same slick needle with a lace tip–i.e., longer/more tapered and pointier; designed for quickly and easily knitting through tiny lace stitches*. However, I didn’t realize at that time that the Addi lace needles do NOT have the same coating that the Turbos do. They are brass instead of nickel and are more grippy than I really want.

So, I’ve done some research on Addis lately, and determined that I want Addi Rockets or Sock Rockets. Same slick finish, same long pointy tip. I think ultimately I want to get an Addi click set (interchangeable needles and cables) with the long Lace tips. In this case, “long” refers to the overall needle length, not the length of the tip. I want the longer needles because I have large hands that tend to fall off the back ends of the shorter ones. It would be convenient to have the shorter ones for some projects (since they don’t contribute extra length to the cable) but I have a few fixed ones that would serve for that. So, on my unofficial wish list they go!

In the meantime, I think it’s time to move to the longer needles…

I tried stretching them out to get a picture of them that way, but they snapped right back into the above position!

*I am not really a lace knitter to any great extent, but I like the longer and pointier tips because I do tend to knit a little tightly.