ChaioGoo Straight Bamboo Needles, Mystery Yarn, Late-Night Airports, and the Great Snowpocolypse of 2009

I have a confession to make. My next project after the hat for my Aunt Nan, I was supposed to get started on a scarf for my friend Trish. It's going to be a beautiful scarf. A lot of cabling and swapping between earthy jewel tones. Great stuff.

This has not happened. Let me explain.

I finished the Hat for Aunt Nan just as the snow was starting to descend on the DC metro area. In the morning, I looked out and saw white as far as the eye could see (excepting the big brick building across the street, that is). This seemed an opportune time to start getting things together for the Great Scarf. Then I started digging out.

First, I tried to dig out my pickup. And the surrounding street. From the fourteen inches of snow packed around it.




After I had that mucked out, I moved on to clearing the sidewalk in front of my building, as well as in front of a friend's house. Then I moved onto the storage units used by my employers. (The damage to the roll up door seen here was caused by the plow the building had hired)


All of it done with this vintage Trenching Shovel.




Through all of these adventures, I discovered that I was in terrible need of both gloves and a scarf. Also ahead of me loomed a good deal of travelling as I went home to Iowa for the Holiday. The scarf which I have in mind for Trish is going to be a mastepiece of intricatly woven color and pattern. This translates to being horrible travel knitting. All of these factors combined led me to pick up a project that was started roughly 3-4 years ago and has been languishing at the bottom of my project bag since.



The pattern is a simple 3x3 Moss stitch (knit 3, purl 3, maintain pattern for three rows, then invert) that I came up wiht mostly to play with a new yarn I found while working at my old yarn store. The yarn its self is a VERY loose 2-ply yarn made of 100% wool, completly undyed. More information, i am at a loss for, as I can no longer find the tag, the store I purchased it at is now closed, andi can't recall enough information to find out anything usefull in a Google search. Still it is a plesant yarn to work with, if a bit rough, and is taking the pattern well.

I am having to be very careful with my tension (something I have had perrenial problems with) to prevent the yarn from pulling apart, but i class this as 'Good Training' and just make on with it. The stitch its self was choosen to give the work a bit more pattern than a straight garter stitch would while still letting the work lie flat. A simple stitch like this also allows the qualities of the yarn to shine for themselves.

I started the roject on a pair of Boye US9 14" aluminium needles, but haave switched over to ChiaoGoo US9 bamboo needles, mostly becasue they are shorter and thus far easier to deal with in a Coach class seat. To be honest, I vastly prefer wooden needles over metal ones anyway, so I was biased towards the switch once I decided to pick the project up again.

ChaioGoo is a very popular brand of bamboo craft needles and accessories. I have found them in a number of large chain stores, as well as in a great many smaller specialty shops and yarn stores. They most often fill the 'budget' end of the display and are fairly inexpensive as a rule, with straight needles being found for under $5 prety much everywhere I go. I own a couple of pairs of straight needles as well as a set or two of DP sock needles made by the brand. Also, all of my circular needles bear their mark. I fear that last isn't much of an endorsement, I really don't like using circular needles, so I never want to spend much money on them.

The needles themselves are made from a coated bamboo with a polished finish. The brand and size of the needle are printed or laser-etched into the shaft near the head of straight needles and just to one side of center on the DPs. The look of the needles are fairly uniform, although quality control beyond appearance is a little more sketchy. Most retailers will accept and replace broken needles, acting as agent to the distributor to fulfill the warrenty.

In use the needles generally work very well. The finish on the needles does wear off over time, but it take a good while. Even then, the needles are generally polished enough by use to remain workable. Over time (and, on rare occations, straight out of the package) the bamboo neeldes do warm and bed to fi the hand that is using them, resulting in gently arcing needles. I have never found this to hurt whatever project I was working on with them, but it is a good example of the living wood.

The great danger with these needles is that they will split over time and use. sometimes the amount of time and use needed to cause such breakage is depressingly little. this is most frusrating for me on sock projects where I cna be cranking along the body of the foot and not notice that I've been pushing a couple of plys of yarn down an ever-widening split in my needle. Sometimes the needlws can also fail in more dramatic fashions, one DP fell apart in my hand into 4 pieces simultaniusly, leaving a bit of work to pick the stitches up again.

All in all, ChiarGoo needles are fine, inexpensive needles to perform for small projects or parts of a pattern where you don't want to pour a great deal of money down for just a couple hundred stitches. Likewise, I often give these needles away to those I'm teaching how to knit, as I still find them more comfortable than metal needles to work with, while being inexpensive enough to not be bothered if the student doesn't end up sticking with it. Not heirloom tools by any means, ChiaoGoo still makes a fully functional needle that, more often than not, will get the job done.




(The author waiting to check-in at BWI airport Dec. 22)



http://www.chiaogoo.com/