Building your needles

Knitpro interchangeable needles are one of our best-selling lines. This is really no surprise, because they're a delight to work with. The points are nice and sharp, the materials are pleasing to the touch and the flexibility of the tip-and-cable system is hard to beat. We sometimes get asked to demonstrate how best to assemble them, so we thought it would be useful to blog it. Your first pair of Knitpros will probably be a single cable and one pair of tips - just what you see in the picture above. Also pictured are the little Allen key and a pair of maroon plastic discs which come with the cables. A lot of people ignore the key and the discs, but they play an important part, as we're about to see. The cable screws into the tip. You can get it reasonably closed using nothing but your fingers, but there's no need to try for complete tightness: You see, this is what the Allen key is for. Near the end of the metal fixing on the cable, there's a little hole right through. Put the key through it, and the hold that it allows makes it much easier to get a very tight closure between cable and tip - so tight that you don't need to worry about it unscrewing by itself. If you're using wooden or acrylic tips, take care to hold the tip by its metal cuff. Twisting the tip by holding it further from the join can weaken the join. If you're using metal tips, there's no join so you don't need to be so careful. So what are the two plastic discs for? Well, supposing that half way through the project you wanted to take the tips off that cable to use for something else, those discs mean you can do it safely. They screw onto the ends of the cables, so that your precious stitches can't make a bid for freedom. You could also use them if you wanted to construct a pair of long flexible single-pointed needles - a tip on one end of the cable and a disc on the other, and you can have a pair of needles up to a metre and a half long! (If you used the connections that join one Knitpro cable to another, they could be even longer, but one struggles to imagine why you'd need them longer!) This is also a good place to mention that Knitpro needles have a five year guarantee - if something awful happens to your tips or your cable, get in touch with us.