More arriving next week!
When knitting top-down, seamless sweaters, there comes a point when you need to take your sleeve stitches off onto a holder. Safety-pin type stitch holders don’t work for this. Scrap yarn works, but tends to slip up into the stitches, making the job of getting each stitch back onto a needle laborious. You can leave them on a spare circular needle or cord – but it’s challenging to have needles and cord hanging everywhere.
Julie Weisenberger, creator of Cocoknits, found that a leather cord had the flexibility of yarn, but [was] firm enough to keep the stitches from disappearing up into themselves. The interior-threaded needle means you can knit onto and off of the cord – like a leather circular needle. The needles screw onto, and off of, the leather cord. These new cords are vegetable tanned, like your Cocoknits LEATHER HANDLE KIT, and they don’t dry out as quickly as the original cords. They start out softer and require less conditioning so they won’t “stick” to yarn as much. For your more rustic yarns, or if you don’t mind conditioning often - the ones included in the original kit work fine, but these new cords work better for finer yarns.
Includes:
- Two interior-threaded needles made of nickel-plated steel
- Three lengths of leather cord:
- one long (59"/150 cm) – holds sts of sweater body
- two short (29.5"/75 cm) – holds sts of sleeves
Care:
- Just like hands, leather can get dry & needs moisturizing. Julie suggest treating the cord with THREAD MAGIC or another thread conditioner to keep your cords smooth and limber.
- Screw the needle on only until it is attached to the cord. If you continue to over-screw, you risk breaking the leather inside the needle.
- Snipping the end of your leather cord at an angle will facilitate attaching the needle.
- Leather has a grain, so be sure to "go with the grain" when sliding stitches on & off the cord.
