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You are here: Home / Knit / Working the kinks out of your circular knitting needles

Working the kinks out of your circular knitting needles

By Know-it-All Nikki 4 Comments

How to work the kinks out of your knitting needles

I did not come into this knitting thing easily. I paid for one class at my local yarn shop (class was free providing I bought the needles and yarn from the store) and the rest, give or take a few questions I’ve learned on my own or via YouTube.

YouTube has been such a help for learning to knit that I wanted to start sharing some of the things that I’ve learned.

One of the biggest problems that I have with my circular knitting needles is knitting on kinked up, stiff cables. This only happens when I buy a certain brand or brands of needles that are usually found in chain craft stores or box stores like Walmart. I don’t have this problem when I buy a different (read more expensive) brand of needles through my local yarn shop but I can’t always afford them and I have a huge Freudian ID problem and PDD (project deficit disorder) when it comes to knitting and so I will rush out and buy the less expensive stiffer circular needles in order to get my project started sooner than later.

This of course results in lots of cursing and un-kinking needles as I knit and that’s when the PDD sets in and project gets tossed aside.

After searching Google and asking Heather what to do, I learned that you can heat up the cable on the circular needle in order to achieve a more flexible, less kinked cable – definitely easier for all those must start now projects. Unfortunately I didn’t really find a good tutorial so I decided to make one of my own.

You’re welcome.

You can probably (and safely) immerse the cables in water a third time but I’d do it for only 10 or 15 seconds – no longer.

Don’t submerge them all the way, leave a bit of space between the join (where the cable connects to the needle itself) and the water. It is possible to melt the glue if you don’t.

I’ve straightened a number of circular needles this way and it’s been a relief to not have to fight my circular needles every time I want to work in the round or on a large project like a blanket.

Got questions? Don’t hesitate to ask me in the comments!

Filed Under: Knit Tagged With: circular needles, how to, knitting, knitting tips

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Jamie

    May 8, 2013 at 10:12 pm

    I sure wish I knew how to knit – shared on Twitter!

    Reply
  2. Rose Powell

    May 9, 2013 at 8:56 am

    Well that’s pretty neat, I wish I knew exactly what circular needles looked like in action! I am fascinated by knitting, but have never actually tried it!

    Reply
  3. Debbie

    May 9, 2013 at 2:14 pm

    Tried to pin but not sure it did. Nice post. I have not knitted in a long time. Do a lot of crochet tho

    Reply
  4. Paula

    June 6, 2016 at 7:45 pm

    I’d heard about heating the cables in warm water, but had never tried it. Good to know it works. I have a mix of cheap and semi-costly needles, and prefer circulars even when I don’t need them because straight needles are clunky for me.

    Reply

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