Circular Needle Loop Trick

One problem encountered in knitting a circular piece from the center out is deciding when to move from the double-pointed needles that were necessary when the circle was very small, to a circular needle. It is often the case that the number of stitches has grown to the point where the stitches are crowded on the dp's, but yet there aren't enough stitches to go all the way around your circular needle. Here's a solution.

[Circular too long for your piece?] Knit the piece off of the double-pointed needles onto the circular. You can see that there are not yet enough stitches in my doily to go all the way around the circular needle.

Choose a spot just to the right of the right needle where a little stretching of stitches wouldn't be too obvious. I've chosen a place--marked by the yellow arrow--where a line of eyelets will disguise any distortion.

[Grab the cable.] Grab hold of the cable between the stitches in the chosen place, and pull it through, stretching the knitting as little as possible.
[Pull a small loop and twist it.] Pull a bit of the cable up between the stitches, and give it a twist. It helps if your needle's a brand that has a very flexible cable; this one is Inox. Once the loop is formed, you can make it as large as you like without further stretching your knitting.
[Give yourself as much slack as you like.] Pull the loop as big as you want, to give yourself enough slack in the knitting to move it easily on the cable as you knit. The loop will curve to the back of the work out of the way.
[Loop comes around to the beginning again.] As you knit around your circle, the loop will move along with the knitting. When you come around and knit the last stitch before the loop, the loop will come undone and you will have to make a new one, as you did before--and so on, every round, until the piece is large enough to reach around the circle.

Late note: Joy Beeson on the tech list says that another way to do this is to simply knit part of the stitches onto the cable needle, then twist the cable into a loop and continue knitting the rest of the stitches. This avoids the possible kinking and the need to stretch to pull the loop through. If you have a very long cable needle, you can insert more than one twist.

Even later note: This method has now been made the subject of a book and is widely known as the Magic Loop.


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Judy Gibson
Descanso, California
Email to jgibson (at) cts (dot) com
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