Persistent Knitter

I have the good luck to be a test knitter for a friend of mine with a sock of the month club.  This is a great club because there is a lot of variety in yarns & patterns.  The current sock I’m testing is a beautiful cabled sock with a twisted rib made with Alpaca.  SOoooo soft I can’t wait to wear them.  I’m still working on my sock to test the pattern (and it’s going very well). Here’s my progress:

One thing I’m learning through this is that I like using a cable needle even on a simple 2 over 1 cable.  I am also learning what needles are best for what yarns.  What "they" say is true, you might really like one kind of needle, but it might not work for all yarns.

Here are the results of my needle tryouts on this sock:

Skacel, Metal, 8" long: Points are great, not too sharp or blunt, but very slippery with the Alpaca. Esp at the beginning when you don’t have a stable sock yet

Crystal Palace, 6" long, Bamboo: Too pointy - splits the yarn a lot, but the grip of the bamboo is nice.  These have been my favorite sock DPNs up until I found the skacel ones. They tend to get bendy after a while, esp in the smaller sizes like I use for socks.

Pony Pearls, 6" long, plastic: Too pointy! This was a surprise to me, as I’ve always hated how blunt the ponies are. They were just as pointy as the Crystal Palace DPNs. They had good grip on the yarn though.

Brittany, 5" long, wood: They aren’t too pointy, so don’t split the yarn, and the wood grips the Alpaca pretty well. They are slightly shorter than all the others; but if you use all 5 (knit with one, 4 in the sock) then this isn’t really a problem.

I’m using a pony pearl needle as my cable needle, mainly because it’s bright yellow and easy to find. They don’t make "real" cable needles in a 2.0 mm or 2.25 mm size, can you believe it?

For the record, I have bought three sets of DPN needles for this sock. You’d think I would eventually NOT need more needles!!

One note to those in the club that may be reading this: The color shown here isn’t what is going out in the kits. The kits will contain a really pretty green color of the same yarn. I  started my test sock before the real color came in, so this is what I got.  I actually happen to like the blue, so it’s not really a disappointment for me :)