Needle details
Saturday March 21st 2026, 9:54 pm
Filed under: Friends,Knit,LYS

Atelier Yarn Marin, a week ago, my last Yarn Crawl purchase: I found a pair of 40″ Lantern Moon ebony circs in US 5 and told them happily, This is exactly the size and brand I’ve been looking for.

Nina mentioned afterwards that she did not prefer the metal cord they’ve changed to; she liked the old nylon one better. I didn’t have much of an opinion other than that I liked the look of the nylon better. And true, I do not want my needles to flash light and distract from the working yarn.

So where I’m going with this is: I found that I did in fact have an old pair of size 5 (3.75mm) 40″ ones–in that brand and with the nylon cord, no less. So I started the new project on those.

You know that twitchy scritch scritch sensation with each stitch on wooden needles that haven’t aged well? You won’t get that with the pressure-treated Holz and Steins of long ago but they’ve been out of the American market for twenty+ years. On the third row of this I couldn’t wait to get to the end so I could switch to the new pair. Thank goodness for that new pair.

Even the ever so slightly rounder tip shaping was better for the splittable yarn at hand.

I have completely cured myself of wondering why I spent the equivalent of a skein of good yarn on a pair I didn’t need. Now it’s, Man am I glad I bought those!


2 Comments so far
Leave a comment

I hope someone starts making The Good Ones again sometime! I have weird shoulder issues and wood needles are part of the solution to still being able to knit at least a little bit, but I use DPNs instead of circulars. (but I mostly have bulk cheap bamboo DPNs of extremely uneven quality but always-not-great tips; they do work better for the shoulders than my vintage metal needles, but they’re not a great shape and they are sometimes snaggy)(now I’m wondering whether hardened wood, instead of plain wood, clicking together would be as much of a problem for the shoulders as anodized aluminum clicking together; hm. Maybe I won’t try to find some Much Nicer ones in my most-used size in case I love them but the shoulders can’t cope with them…)

Comment by KC 03.22.26 @ 8:57 am

Oh, the right tools are so worth it! The search for which ones are right for you can be frustrating, but when it gets just right, oh yeah.

Comment by ccr in MA 03.23.26 @ 5:40 am



Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

(required)

(required)