Double Pointed Needles for Beginners

Today I'm going to show you how to knit with double pointed needles. Double pointed needles usually come in a set of five or six, and they're used to knit in the round. Now you might be thinking, well I thought circular needles are for knitting in the round. What's this double pointed needle business? And you're absolutely right. Circular needles are for knitting in the round, but they can't knit everything. The smallest circular needle is 16 inches, and that's still too big to knit things like a sock or a mitten or the top of a hat, basically things with a small circumference. I mean, how's this sock going to fit on a 16 inch circular needle? Well, it's not. So what are we going to do? Enter double pointed needles. Double pointed needles are specialized for knitting small things in the round, like socks, mittens, the tops of hats, and even the teeny tiny finger portions of gloves. Yep, we can get real small with these bad boys. So how do double pointed needles work? Okay, let me do a quick analogy for you. So you can think of knitting on circular needles like taking a train. The stitches get on the train, or they're cast on, and then they're knit around and around and around. They never get off the train until they reach their final destination, at which point they disembark, or we cast them off, and the journey is complete. On double pointed needles, however, our stitches are not exactly on a train. They're on a bus. And they're not taking the bus from point A to point B. They're getting on the bus, going a little ways, transferring to another bus, going a little ways, transferring again, and around and around they go. They're transferring from one bus to another bus until they reach their final destination, also known as casting off. So double pointed needles are not as direct as using circular needles, but they're also not that hard to master. So with that bus analogy in mind, let's get into the demo and go through this step by step. I've got four double pointed needles, and I'm going to start casting on some stitches onto one of my needles. So the number of stitches you cast on will just depend on what you're knitting, what your pattern calls for. If you're just practicing, you can cast on like 45 stitches. That's going to be the number of stitches that I cast on for this demo. So now I've cast on 45 stitches onto one needle, and I need to start dividing these stitches onto two more needles. So I want my stitches to be spread evenly on a total of three needles. So 45 divided by 3 is 15. So that means that each needle should have 15 stitches. So you can do the same. You can divide your stitches by 3, and the number that you get will be the number of stitches that each needle should have. So don't worry if your stitches don't divide perfectly. Just round up or down, that's totally fine. So I'm just picking off stitches from my needle with a bunch of stitches onto my bare needle. 14 and 15. So I've got 15 stitches onto this needle, and I'm just going to push it so that the stitches are in the middle of the needle. I don't want them to accidentally fall off. So now here's my third needle, and I'm going to start picking off some stitches. So I would need 15. So here's 4. So I've just picked up 15 onto my third needle, and I'm going to push my stitches so that they're in the middle of my needle. And I'll do the same for this third needle here. Just push it so that my stitches are in the center of the needles. So now that our stitches are evenly divided, let's talk about how to hold our needles. So our needles before we join in the round are like this weird jumbly thing. They feel awkward and unstable. So first we're going to look for the needle that has your long tail cast on and your ball of yarn attached to it. So you can see right away, that would be this needle. This needle has what's left of our long tail, and it also has our working yarn, which has our ball of yarn attached to it. So this is our guy. So we want to keep this needle on the right side. Now on the left side, we're going to use this needle and push our stitches up close to the tip of our needle. And again, I'm keeping that little triangle shape. So I'm going to use my naked needle, our working needle. This is the needle that has no stitches on it whatsoever. So I'm going to use my naked needle, and I'm going to push into the first stitch on my left needle. So here we go, isolated that stitch, and I'm going to push my naked needle into it. You can see my naked needle has speared into this first stitch. Now I'm going to take my working yarn on my right needle, and I'm going to wrap it around my naked needle. I'm going to go underneath my right needle, and then over onto my naked needle. So again, I'll show you. Here's my working yarn, and I'm going to go underneath my right needle, kind of underneath that naked needle, and then just wrap it around like this. I'm going to wrap it around my naked needle, and then just knit into this first stitch using my working yarn. So I've knit into it, and now I'm going to just push it off. I'm going to take off my left needle and make it nice and tight, give it a little tug. And now, if you look closely, you can see that I've joined in the round. Now I've got four needles into the mix. Pretty cool, right? So let's continue knitting across our left needle. So I've knit into that first stitch, I'm going to move into the second stitch. Just push into it, and continue knitting into it. So we are moving across our first needle, and we're nearing the end of it. Here we go, and there it is. So here's our last stitch. And cool! Now we've just knit across our first needle, right? Here it is! Awesome! So now we're back to three needles in our work, little triangle shape, and we have our naked needle once again. So what I usually do when I finish knitting off the stitches from one needle is I push my stitches to the middle of my needle, so I'm going to just do that. Right into the middle, that just keeps my stitches nice and secure, they have less risk of falling off my needle. Okay, cool! So now I'm going to bring my naked needle back in, and I'm going to turn my work like this. So here's my working yarn, right? My working yarn needle is always on my right side. And now I'm going to push my needle down so that my stitches are nice and close to the tip of my needle, and I'm going to continue all over again. Here's my naked needle, my working needle. Push it into the first stitch, and then I'm going to take my working yarn and go around my working needle, my naked needle. Can you see? It's a little bit hard to see, so I'm going to just twist this here. I'm going to give it a little tug, wrap it around my naked needle, and then just knit into it. So it's a little bit complicated at first, because you've got three needles going on doing their own thing, but you will get used to it. And here's my last stitch on my left needle, let's just knit into that. So now I've finished knitting off my needle, and we have our naked needle again, and again I'm going to just push my stitches onto the middle of my needle. So we've just knit stitches from two needles, this one and this one, and now we're on our last needle, so I'm going to turn my needle configuration again, and here's my working yarn, this is on my right side, and here's my needle, and I'm going to push it so that the stitches are up close to the tip. So this is going to be the last needle before we get to the beginning of our round. So here's my naked needle, we're going to push it into the first stitch of my left needle, just push it in, here's my working yarn, I'm going to go around my working needle, and then pull it through, and then pop it off the needle. I'm going to go into the next stitch, and do the same thing. Here we go, here's my last stitch, and bada-bing bada-boom, we are finished! Our first round. Okay, so here we go, let's take a look, take stock. So here we go, we have just completed our first round, and I know that because here is my long-tail cast-on here, so the long-tail from our long-tail cast-on kind of marks the beginning and end of the round. It's almost like our own little stitch marker, okay? Alright, so we can just keep on going, right? Your working yarn is always going to be on your right side, your stitches to be knit are going to be on your left needle, push the stitches up close to the tip of your needle, naked needle is going to go into the first stitch on your left needle, use your working yarn, wrap it around that needle, and then knit into that stitch, pop it off the needle. So this is kind of where our bus analogy comes in, right? We are taking one bus, in this analogy, our needle is a bus, so here's our first bus, and once we get to the end of our journey on our first bus, we're going to move on to our second bus. This would be our second bus. We're transferring over to our second bus. Once we've completed that, we're going to move over to our third bus, transfer over to another bus, and around and around we go, right? Our whole journey is made up of transferring from one needle to the next needle, okay? That's all there is to it. Thanks so much for watching! If you like this video, then please give it a big thumbs up, and if you want to see more technique videos like this, then make sure to subscribe. And hey, if there's a technique that you're struggling with, or one that you'd like to learn, then let me know about it down in the comments. I'm Damina from SheepandStitch.com, thanks for watching, and happy knitting!