You know what? Knitting is supposed to be fun and relaxing. Just don’t use dpns or circulars if they’re stressing you out. There are what, like 6 gazillion patterns out there that don’t require them? Even if you sat down and knit all day every day for the rest of your life, you would never run out of patterns that you could make with straight needles, right?

Work on your clapotis, or make something else. Give yourself some time and try dpns again later. Maybe it’s just not the time for you, maybe it never will be. Just don’t beat yourself up over it, it’s not worth it…

Hugs.

i find that i have an easier time with bamboo dpns than with metal. the bamboo have more give and allow for more control — with the metal dpns, the needles tend to fly out of my hands making me a danger to animal and human alike.

i am not familiar with the laddering problem when knitting with dpns (i get the ladders when i knit intarsia though). unclench your hands a little

it sounds like your laddering problem is the same as mine. The issue isn’t the first stitch on the needle (so tugging really tight won’t help)… it’s the last stitch on the needle. It gets stretched out when it’s the only one holding up all the knitting. Try to support it so that it’s not doing all the work. There’s a couple of ways I do it that help. One is to rest the knitting on something so that it doesn’t hang. The other (which works better, but is a little more fiddly to accomplish) is to hold the left needle together with the next needle so that last stitch doesn’t get pulled (not parallel, just however it works for you to keep the two stitches together).

Ohhhh… I just had another idea, and I haven’t tried it, so I can’t promise anything. When you get to the last two stitches on a needle, slide the needle through them so they’re at the other end and slip them onto the following needle, but still knit them onto the current right needle. Or, if you’re brave and the yarn isn’t too slick, just slide the needle out and then the next one in.

It’s after 2 am, so if I’m not making sense, then email me (there’s a link on my blog), and I’ll try to make more sense during normal waking hours.

Don’t try to pull the stitches tight over the between-needle interstices. Instead, just knit a few extra from the next needle before you start knitting with the empty needle.

Did that make any sense? It works best if you’re working with five needles (knitting around a square) rather than four (knitting around a triangle).

You come knitting along, working towards the end of the stitches on your left needle. Boing – end of the stitches on the left needle. DO NOT start knitting from the NEXT left needle with the empty needle. Instead, knit two or three stitches using the same right-hand needle as you were, from the new left-hand needle.

THEN start knitting from the new left-hand needle with the empty right-hand needle (that was the old left-hand needle).

Knitting is the devil to explain in words. Yell if that didn’t make sense! gljudson@svahaconcepts.com

I do worry sometimes that “free communication” is costing so much and making this into a country of haves and have nots. I resent cable for the same reason. Can too much “capitlism” be a bad thing?

Oh, and the joy of dpns is giving up on being in total control all the time. I’ve sort of (not completely, mind you) gotten used to the occasional parrallelogram collapse of socks. But like most problems, it’s always fixable.

Oh, and I love the idea of just sticking your hands in a couple of skeins of yarn! Hysterical!