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PegP

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I want to try lace knitting after seeing the baby hat pattern discussed yesterday. I went to Youtube and watched some of the videos for the feather and fan pattern. She said to be sure and use a lace needle. What is the difference between regular needles vs lace needles?
 
Use what you have on hand. The designer used lace needles, that doesn't mean you have to. If you have a problem with your own needles and can afford to buy lace needles, you can always indulge in another pair. You won't know until you try.

Carol J.
 
PegP said:
Since this will be my first lace project, would it make a difference if I used regular needles? Or, do you get a finer stitch with lace needles?
To make lace, the little holes are made by doing a yarn over. That adds an extra stitch.

So, lace knitting involves, not only a lot of YOs, but a lot of decreases to compensate for the YOs.

If you have a very blunt point on your needles, like an Addi turbo, it's a lot harder to do a K2tog, or a stitch where you decrease two whole stitches. I've seen places on lace where you start with 5 stitches and wind up with one because you've decreased 4 stitches all at once.

I've also done non-lace knitting where I spent a whole minute (which is a long time--check it on a clock with a second hand) just to one K2tog because my needle was very blunt and had a fat point! Once I discovered lace needles, I'd rather use them for everything!

If you're doing decreases, the longer, slimmer point of a lace needle slides into two or more stitches and still leaves you room to get the other needle in there and to finish the decrease.

I can do decreases on blunt needles, but it's slow, and it's hard work compared to lace needles.
 
I use ordinary needles as I like my lace knitting especially to be loose, so even the stocking stitch is delicate.

The 'proper' lace needles with their longer points I find a bit self defeating. Maybe it's just the way I knit, or move the stitches or something, but with the long points by the time the knitting gets to the part of the needle where the needle is full size, the stitches have formed on the smaller diameter nearer the point and are are tight fit on the rest of the needle, so I have to use at least one size larger needle than I normally would to get the gauge and appearance that I want.

Then, because the stitches are smaller than they would have been if I was knitting with ordinary needles, the longer, finer point is needed to be able to knit into the left hand needle.

The only time I thought I was going to have to change was when I started doing the Estonian lace nibs; I had terrible trouble getting the shorter point into all 7 loops. But when I looked at my underwhelmingly pathetic nibs I realised I wasn't pulling the loops long enough. As soon as I did that correctly, the 7 loops at a time became a doddle to do.

So yes, you can easily start with the needles you already have and you may or may not decide to try lace needles.
 
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