Motherly Devotion, That Is Moi...and Kollage Needle Review

I must be the world's most devoted mother. Why? Because even though I vowed to start NO new projects so that I can finish OpArt and then move on to my works in progress and lovely queue, I ended up starting something new last night. Because I am a very good, devoted mother.

You see, my beloved Beccano, shown here wearing his family tartan tie at the wedding, actually asked me to make him something, as we were driving home from his guitar lesson, he with a brand new-to-him instrument in his hands that he bought with mostly his own money.

You may recall that, last time, he asked for a black hat. Prior to that, he wanted a lucha libre mask, in black. What did he ask for this time? Black gloves. And he asked that 5 days before he leaves for Wisconsin to spend the holidays "living like a rich person" (that is what he calls spending time with his step-mother's very nice family). Did he want nice thick mittens? No, gloves in sock yarn. I guess the best thing about this was that I did happen to already own two skeins of workhorse black Bernat Sox sock yarn, given to me by someone a couple of years ago, so I didn't have to go search it out. I tried to get him to accept brown, but, nope. He wanted black. Nothing's funner than knitting black stuff on tiny needles, ya know. Which proves that I am a very devoted mother to agree to do this for him.

I did think of something that would make the project more look-forward-to-able, and that was that I could try out my new square knitting needles on the project, and that I could go up a size, so maybe I wouldn't need as many stitches. Sure enough, I only needed 48 stitches in this yarn and size 1 square needles to go around his wrist. I plugged all his numbers into the wonderful Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns, by Ann Budd and got to going on it. By the time I was ready to stop knitting and get some reading done (hands are still a bit sore from the hat-a-thon), I had the cuff and partway up the thumb gusset done. I am guessing I will have at least one glove done by the time he leaves, so maybe he can keep one hand in his pocket, like the time it snowed when I was in college (in Florida), and my roommate and I had only one pair of mittens between us, so we each wore one and kept the other hand in our pockets. At least we got to touch the snowflakes and try to scape together enough snow to throw snowballs, even one-handed! We were 18 years old and it was our first snow (I am laughing right now, because Canadian friends took their kids to central Florida this week and took photos of their first palm tree and first trip to the Atlantic--all things I'd experienced before I coule walk--isn't the earth amazing?).

Kollage Square Needle Review

I’d wanted to do a little review of the Kollage needles as soon as I got a chance to use them, so here are my initial impressions. If you are considering getting some, you may want to read on.

• The needles feel great in the hand. I love the way they are balanced and enjoy knitting with them. The ends are not too round and not too sharp, and the squareness does not interfere with the actual knitting.
• The transition between needle and cord is very good. It doesn’t catch on anything, and that’s important to me, since every time one of my KnitPicks cables gets out of whack, it creates a little “catch” in the transition area.
• The cable is incredibly light and thin, which has good and bad points. It’s really easy to divide for magic loop knitting, for example, but it is really hard to push all the stitches forward to go to the next section in magic loop. The needle pushes through, but the cable doesn’t want to move with it, so it gets all doubled up. And I can’t slide the stitches down the cable like I usually do. There’s nothing to hold on to. And of course, I got pretty long needles, because I find those more flexible, so there is a lot of cable pushing between halves of rows.
• Still, I have figured out ways to deal with the cable lightness (I wouldn’t say “flimsy” because that has bad connotations—it’s just very thin, light and flexible), so it doesn’t really detract much from the knitting. And the good parts sort of balance this challenge out.

I did have a friend at the yarn shop say she is much happier with the larger needles, which have a thicker cable, so if you have concerns about the cable on the teeny sizes, you might consider ordering size 4 or higher, and see how those work for you. I’ll see if I can come up with a project that would use the larger size I bought, to see how I like those. Or, I might get more in the size of whatever project I get to do next…if I finish OpArt, the orange sweater and the Itchy Shalom, all of whom are patiently waiting for me to return my attention to them. I like how these feel well enough to want more. But then, I always want more needles.