Somewhere in the archives of this group is a detailed description of my
needle making. I think there is also something on my blog -
http://gansey.blogspot.com/.

I started making wooden needles because I wanted to understand how tip shape
affected my knitting - Why buy commercial needles if you are just grind the
heck out them? Wooden dowel is cheap and easy to find - unfortunately the
kinds of woods that are used for cheap dowel these days do not make *great*
knitting needles. However, with a pen knife and a bit of sand paper, very
functional knitting needles can be made. (Once you have learned the
technique, you can get more suitable woods and make some really fine
knitting needles. (And, once you have confidence, you can buy a set of
commercial wooden or bamboo needles and use them as blanks to make needles
that really suit your knitting style and that really work with the yarns
that you like.) I harvest dogwood twigs in the spring, split them, whittle
them to shape, and make fine knitting DPN with a minimal investment in time
and materials. I feel that those dogwood needles are as good as the best
(or most expensive) commercial wooden needles. I believe that dogwood is
the very best wood for knitting needles. This puts me in the minority as
*rosewood* is the official religion in this group.

I am interested in traditional knitting methods that used long steel
needles. Such long steel needles did not seem to be commercially available.
After some experimentation, I settled on using a small, electric bench
grinder to form the tips by rotating commercial "music rod" against the
grinding wheel with my screw gun. Music rod or piano wire is available
inexpensively in most hardware stores. This process produces a DPN blank.
These were tools that I felt many "handy" households were likely to own and
which produced a good needle. The blank is then hand polished with emery
paper and crocus cloth. The result are quite satisfactory for using with a
knitting sheath to produce traditional fisherman's ganseys such as described
in Gladys Thompson's and Mary Thomas's books. The needles are 2 to 3 mm in
diameter and 12 to 18 inches long. My handmade needles have a much lower
level of polish than the commercial cast and plated needles that are
available in 10 inch lengths. Thus, my needles are less slippery and I find
them easier to use. Also, 10 inch needles are also much harder to join
with without twisting when you are working with cast-ons of more than 220
stitches.

Knitting with a knitting sheath allows much faster knitting than knitting
with SPN or cable needles. Knitting with a knitting sheath and spring steel
needles uses the spring of the needle to perform half of the knitting
motion, reducing joint rotation and stress on the hand and wrists. The
sheath frees the right hand to focus on tension control, and supports the
work. Knitting with a knitting sheath and long steel needles has
dramatically improved the quality of my knitting, increased the speed of my
knitting, and reduced the stress on my hands and wrists.

On the other hand, knitting in the round with long DPN is very dangerous.
These are the knitting needles that your mother warned you about. When
knitting in the round, long sharp needles poke out from your lap - you do
not want a child running up to you while you are knitting with long DPN.
One needle is poking up just below the knitter's eye level. Bend over to
look more closely at your knitting and you could get a knitting needle in
the eye - wear eye protection when knitting in the round with long DPN.
Moreover, long DPN can poke and scratch furniture.

Aaron
"lanfear32" wrote in message
oups.com...
Cool! How do you make your own needls? What tools do you use, and
what made you decide to do that in the first place?

wrote:
What size is that needle? Hard to tell.

I really do not care. I knit swatches with different sized needles and
then
use the needles that produced the fabric that I liked. If you want to
do
better, get a micrometer and measure the actual diameter of your
needles.
The traditional needle gauges with holes in them make errors in needle
naming easy.

Consider US # 1 needles. The holes in the "Boye" standard knitting
needle
gauge and the "Susan Bates Knit Checker" have holes for that are just
larger
than 2.50 mm in diameter so that the Boye and Susan Bates # 1 needles
are
just under 2.50 mm in diameter and *just* fit in that gauge hole.
However,
in the Knitter's Companion, there is a cardboard needle gauge that the
hole
for #1 that is 2.25 mm in diameter, but the text in Knitter's Companion
says
that US #1 is the same as 2 mm?!! Then, when I look at the needle size
chart
in Mary Thomas/ Dover reprint, the diameter of the spots she provides in
her
needle size chart do not match up with the diameters given in the text.
Moreover, my AddiTurbo needle sold to me as a US #1 is about 2.51 mm in
diameter, thus does not fit in the gauge holes for #1 needles. It is
hard
to tell that it is just a little bit over and so and it must be a # 2??
: )

Skipping to the chase here.

Measuring my Susan Bates Knit Check (aluminum knitting needle gauge),
the
sizes of the holes are as follows:
1 - 2.50 mm
0 - 2.25 mm
00 - 1.85 mm
000 - 1.50 mm

However, the sizes of the handmade steel needles that I use a
1 - 2.32 mm
0 - 2.00 mm
00 - 1.65 mm
000 - 1.20 mm
Which is about what you will get if you make your own steel needles from
music rod available in the American market. However, precise metric
sized
spring steel rod is available on the world market.

Of course, you could make those size needles and rename them After all,
what I call a #1 is only 0.07 mm larger than SB's "0" but 0.18 mm
smaller
than what SB calls #1, so by actual size it is much closer to being a
"0"
than a "1". But, it fits in the "1" hole and not the '0" hole, so for
me,
for now, it remains a "1". This why I say that hole based gauges
introduce
real errors in needle naming.

The really bad news is that last night, I did gauge swatches on the
cashmere
yarn that has been sitting like a lump in the middle of the stash, and
this
morning at the breakfast table my wife said that the swatch from the 1.2
mm
needles is the best fabric. It is a lovely fabric, but that is a lot of
knitting. Maybe she would like matching hat and gloves rather than a
sweater.

Aaron