We love circular knitting (knitting in the round) -huge variety of designs and no seams to sew once you’ve finished knitting.....

Both the terms above cover a wide range of interesting ideas techniques and tools - here are a few:

circular needles - dpns - french knitting - spools -knitting looms

Circular knitting needles

Circular knitting needles - used for hats, purses or large items such as afghan or Scandinavian sweaters - are readily available, reasonably priced, extremely popular and easy to use.

You'll find knitting in the round when using eyelash or particularly hairy yarns a breeze. Your work won't slip off your needles and you'll have no difficult seams to sew.

You'll also find circular needles almost indispensable when making bags and purses especially those knitted to felt

Because of a bag's giant pre-felted size your arms can become tired using straight needles you constantly have to turn.

Knit in the round and your work lies easily in your lap.

And because of the lack of side seams there is often no need to line your felted bags.....easy...

We frequently use circ needles when testing our hat and beanie patterns, particularly those with stranded or fair isle designs - avoiding a ton of cut ends to sew in later.

We know some knitters use a 16inch (40cm) circular needle for their hats - but we find these a little too short and awkward - prefering to use one 24 inches (60cm). You can use a circ right up to the decreasing section - but once you're working the crown decrease you'll find you have too much needle and too few stitches....
When you reach this point simply knit off the next round onto your dpns and you'll find decreasing a breeze.....

dpns or double pointed needles

Dpns are wonderfully useful (no - not just for garden stakes or flicking things out from behind the fridge....)

We find sox with back seams uncomfortable so use dpns when designing and knitting our sock knitting patterns.

Depending on the number of stitches required (usually between 4 and 8) we often use dpns to work i-cord bag handles.

This leads me to another couple of methods to knit in the round.

French knitting

Remember this yarn craft from your youth? French knitting dollies, knitting nancys or cotton reels (depending where you hail from and perhaps your age group !) are still a great way to get children interested in crafting.

Well not just the children we use them frequently to make purse handles - particularly when travelling and dpns aren't an option.

Take another look at french knitting

Spool knitting

Spool knitting is similar to french knitting only more so.... Crone-findlay is a great site to learn about spool knitting (page opens in a new window - close it to return here)

And last but not least...the circular knitting gadgets even those who can't or don't like to knit have fun with...

Knitting looms

knitting looms ...more about these shortly......

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