I’m feeling a little smarter now. As I said I would, I put aside my OpArt blanket for a couple of days. I figured that approaching it with fresh eyes would be helpful, and that was definitely the case. For some reason, I was getting really perplexed about knitting on two circular needles, but now it is definitely making more sense to me. I think I just had to let it rattle around in my head for a bit. I frogged my OpArt for the second time, but this time it was because I had so much fun proving that I understood the methodology that I made way too many rounds with the four initial stitches. Before I frogged, I acquired a neat new skill: purling in the front and back of a stitch! I’ve done the opposite with my Jaywalker socks, and I’m glad that I’ve mastered it both ways.
Update: Here are a few images that kind of show how the two needles look and the directions in which the ends are facing.
This is where the blanket is starting to get big, but you can see the ends of the needles pointing in different directions.
Later, with a lot more stitches, the directions of the needle ends are perhaps easier to see.
I'm iunfold on Ravelry.
February 4th, 2009 - 6:10 pm
Hi there,
I’m working on this blanket pattern now and having a difficult time figuring out how to knit with two circulars; in fact, I started over about 4 times and just went with DPNs for a while, switched to a shorter circ and now am on one long circ. How does the second circ come in? Any suggestions?
February 4th, 2009 - 7:05 pm
Hi, I used two circulars the whole time, so this is just a guess, but I would say that once you felt uncomfortable working on one circular needle (because no matter how long it is, unless you’re using the Denise interchangeable needles or some other similar system where you can keep increasing the length of your circular, you’re going to run out of room on one circular needle), you should switch. You’d switch to the second circular needle it at the beginning of your third section.
I’d never before knit on two circular needles before starting this project. I got a little confused in the beginning and worked with the wrong needle more than once, meaning that all of my stitches ended up on the same needle, but now I’ve realized that each end of the same needle will point in the same direction, and that I should only knit with the needles that point the same way. So the ends of the circular needle containing sections 1 and 2 pointed to the right, and the ends of the circular needle containing sections 3 and 4 pointed to the left. I’ll add some (older) pictures of the blanket to this post, to show what I mean. It gets harder to see in images once the stitch count climbs past 500…