I’m a 7. I don’t mean, like, on a hotness scale of 1 to 10. I mean, my natural gauge — the gauge at which I feel most at ease as a knitter — is 4.5mm, aka US7. I’m content anywhere from US4 to US10-ish, am not unhappy on the bigger fellas, 11-13. But these US19s I’m currently knitting on? Not a fan. I just don’t enjoy working with needles bigger than my fingers. The obvious upside is it goes faster — although the gains of giant stitches are somewhat offset by the clumsiness of wielding the tree trunks.
It’s largely a matter of perspective: To sock knitters, my beloved US7s seem gigantic. To the people who knit on PVC pipe, the standard-range needles must all seem hilarious dinky. After knitting for a few days on these 19s, if I pick up the 4s above, they feel like toothpicks. So there’s no going back and forth between my two current projects. (My blue Loopy and my black Anna, that is.) Plus given my lack of joy in the act of this knitting and the fact that the blue sweater isn’t exactly seasonally necessary at the moment, I know if I set it aside to knit even a stitch of anything else, I’ll never pick it back up again. So if I don’t want it to wind up an orphan, I have to just power through. Fortunately, after a week of knitting here and there, I’m almost done!
I feel like we all have a range on the scale where we’re most comfortable, but if I had to choose just one needle size to use forevermore — say I could have whatever assortment of circs and DPNs, etc., but all in the same gauge — the automatic answer for me would be US7. So that’s my Q for You today: What gauge are you?
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PREVIOUSLY in Q for You: Do you also sew?