Knitting: How to Choose Needle Sizes for Different Yarns
How to Choose the Right Needle Size for Various Yarns
When you buy yarn in skeins, the yarn label usually indicates the recommended needle size. Of course, this is just a guideline that helps but doesn't eliminate the need to knit a swatch. The same yarn can be worked with different needles, depending on your "knitting tension" (whether you knit "loose" or "tight"). These are our personal characteristics; some pull the yarn more, others less. When you buy yarn on cones or recycle yarn by unraveling old sweaters, you probably rely on your experience and do some test swatches.
What should a beginner do who has no experience? Here's a post for you. I want to give you a very, very simple tip that will help you choose the right needles.
What you'll need is a knitting needle gauge. There are various types available on the market. In my opinion, it's a very useful tool, especially for those who use circular needles (here's a free course in Italian and in English). Those accustomed to using straight needles find the size on the end, but for those who use circular needles, it's an absolutely indispensable tool, as this indication is usually missing.
Pass two strands of your yarn through one of the holes and find the suitable one: the yarn should not be pulled taut and should fill the hole softly without leaving too much free space. There you have it, you already have the first indication of which needle size to use. Now, make a swatch with the needle size indicated next to the hole. If it seems too "loose," take a smaller needle size; if, however, it seems too "tight," choose larger ones. After a few tries, you'll better understand which needles are right for "your hand."
Lately, I've talked about the interesting opportunities we can have using thin machine yarns (read here). How to proceed in this case? After you've bought machine yarn, you need to decide how many strands you want to work with. This choice depends, of course, on the thickness of the yarn and what you want to create (usually, 3 to 5 strands are used for hand knitting). Remember that, to choose the needle size, you must double the number of strands before passing them through a hole.
Let me give you a practical example. The scarf you see above (described here) was worked with 3 strands of cashmere and silk. To decide which needle size to choose, I had to double the number of threads, so I passed 6 strands through the hole.
Afterward, of course, I had to make a swatch.
If you want to work with 4 strands, you'll need to pass 8 through a hole, and so on.
Hoping this post is useful to you, I wish you... happy swatching :-).
