I have been a machine knitter for twenty some years and have never taken to hand knitting. I can’t explain why – there’s just no attraction. However there are yarns out there that don’t do particulary well on the knitting machine – namely the fun fur, eyelash, and bulky flake types sold in 50 – 80 gram balls. The bulky yarns knit up so fast, but that still is no comfort for those of us who just don’t do 2 needles.
I was shopping around at Big Lots before Christmas and they had a bunch of fun fur Lion brand yarn that would make some delicious scarves for my girls. It was such a great price that I bought most of it and tried (unsuccessfully) to knit it on my Brother 230.
What to do?
I looked at the Knifty Knitter line of hand looms and then I looked at the Pocket Knitter and decided I’d try the Pocket Knitter as it looked more like a very small version of the Bond knitters and would keep the stitches more even due to the “fins”.
The Pocket Knitter does one thing very well – knit stockinette stitch. Purling on one of these is a nightmare and downright impossible to do with the eyelash/fun fur type yarns. I guess it would be easier to drop the knit stitch and latch them up, but that would require a latch hook, which isn’t provided and I was too lazy to dig mine out at the time. I knitted a couple of fun fur scarves, ignored the curly edges, and gave them to the girls.
I started on a scarf out of a different yarn and the curly edges were much more noticeable, so I looked at the Knifty Knitter looms again. I ended up buying both the round and rectangular sets on Craigslist and a whole bunch of patterns for a good price. I used the smallest rectangular loom and did an EON caston that gives a knit/purl rib much like a 2 bed knitting machine and knitted an entire scarf last evening. I really like the result and look forward to using the “Knifty Knitter” for more chunky yarn projects.
My verdict is that the rectangular “Knifty Knitter” style looms that have opposing pegs are more versatile than either the round knitters or the Pocket Knitter.
I am determined to use the round looms, but what I’m having more trouble is trying to figure out which round loom will give me the right size hat for an almost 7 year old. Most of the patterns call for the “green” loom, but I feel the pegs are far enough apart that you can get by with the red loom for this particular yarn. However, what I want is a fitted cap with decreases across the crown, so I think I’m going to look at using one of the rectangular looms so I can do stitch decreases for the crown of the hat a bit easier.
I’m going to be playing with this a while to see what kind of pattern I can come up with.