Traditional needle sizes for laceweight

ClaireUK · Traditional needle sizes for laceweight

I have been looking through 'Heirloom Knitting' by Sharon Stone and the needles used are much thinner than the ones we are recommended to use.

I'm wondering if my problem is that I am trying to use 3.5 - 4.5mm needles instead of the traditional 2-3mm needles they used to use up until the new designs started coming out a few years ago. Hundreds of years of traditional knitting cant be completely wrong, can it?

Perhaps its part of this 'make it quickly' idea which we had thrown at us with scarves a couple of years ago. I wouldnt use 5mm needles for 4 ply or 6mm needles with DK.

I am going to go down several sizes of needle to the recommended ones and see if this helps. I will have to do a swatch and add on more stitches, but perhaps the problem I have with the yarn being too fine isnt the yarn at all, its the modern needle size recommendations being inappropriate for the yarn?

Any ideas anyone? Does this sound logical?

Claire UK

chrissy

I think it depends on what you are making, I am doing the creatures of the reef shawl ( very slowly ) and am using 3.5mm I think needles for laceweight and it is doing beautifully. for the sholawater I used 5mm for sock. It depends on what you are going for, adn what the design calls for, some designs look better on larger nedles some look better on smaller needles, but generally the larger needles produce a much more defined pattern
Chrissy

poshdee

I started the Peace shawl on 4mm needles, and hated how it was coming out. There wasn't enough definition between the lace and the plain. So I dropped down to 3.25mm (and incidentally, switched the design to a stocking stitch background, rather than garter stitch) and it looks much better.

LittleBerry

I think it depends on design, yarn & personal preference.... I did the FC with 4.5mm needles and Jojoland Melody (sock yarn).... I have an aversion to gappy background sts in lace knitting... I umd and awd with 3 or 3.25mm for the VLT shawl but went with 3.25, I think I wished I'd use 3mm now......

A lot of sharon Millers designs are done with quite fine yarns apart from the Jamiesons & Rowan yarns all the ones she sells are fine, the thickest having 15m / g and the finnest (Gossamer Cotton) having 40m/g!!!!!!

YarnAddict

I quite often find that I end up using thinner needles with lace than what hte pattern says. I did that with both my VTL projects. At the moment I'm working on a lace shawl in 4ply and I'm using 3.75 mm needles. Tried 4mm but didnæt like it and went down one size.

I think the main thing is to get a look you're happy with regardless of what the pattern says.