A Wool Worth Big Needles
In knitting, there’s really no immediate gratification. Well, let me clarify that: buying yarn and tools is pretty immediate, but the actual knitting takes time. (Unless you have a knitting machine, but that’s a different post!)
Knitting is a process, and that’s what I love about it. The feel of the yarn flowing through my hands, onto my needles, and transforming into fabric gives me great joy, but in general it isn’t a quick process. And that’s fine.
Sometimes, though, we do want—or need—to get something on and off the needles rapidly, for a gift or just because we want a hat! Working on large needles with bulky or super bulky yarn is about as close as we get to a truly fast finish.
Because I believe in transparency, I have to say that I don’t enjoy knitting on large needles. I have small hands, and as I get older, very small and very large needles hurt my hands after knitting for a long time.
On the flip side, there are some yarns that are worth the big needles; for me, that’s Woolfolk Hygge. It’s a sumptuous blend of Ultimate Merino®, Superbaby Alpaca, and mulberry silk. (Ultimate Merino is a tradmarked product from Woolfolk, and it is fab.)
My first encounter with Hygge was in a yarn shop, and I wanted to buy a skein to use as a pillow. Or knit a pillow with it, or a stuffed animal; basically anything I could cuddle. Meghan Babin, a previous editor of Interweave Knits, was as smitten, too. In fact, she was so inspired by Hygge that she designed three patterns specifically for this yarn: a hat, a cowl, and a poncho.
All three of these patterns are knit on either size US 15 or 17 needles, hence the name of the collection, On Fifteens and Seventeens: A Woolfolk Hygge Collection.
I will dig out my 15s and 17s for these projects, especially that hat!
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