Product review – Giveaway winner reports!

The winner of our first giveaway was Judit from MonsterYarns. She won a set of circular knitting needles and has sent us her review below :> Her review is all her own opinion and first appeared on her own blog with photos here. Reproduced with permission.

Thank you for taking the time to review for us, Judit!

 

I knit a lot in public and on public transport. By necessity therefore I use circular needles to make sure that I don’t prod anyone sitting near me and attract even more weird looks than I normally do. So when UK Crochet Patterns ran a quick competition to win a circular knitting needle from part of the goodie parcel delivered from Red Heart , I jumped at the chance.

I don’t win competitions that often so I was thrilled to add to my collection of needles – especially gratis!

My first impressions were of a good but basic quality of needle – the type where what you see is what you get. Unwrapping it however there were a couple of very pleasant surprises – nice tip on the needle and the coil is fantastic. Just the right amount of stiffness so that it doesn’t kink but not too hard so your work “floats” uncomfortably in front of you.

The needles have a clever curve a few centimetres from the join.

Clever because the perennial problem with any circular needles is snagging on the join between the tip and the coil. The curve is meant to ensure that the knitting feeds in a straight line on to the coil. And it does. Clever.

What doesn’t quite work with these circulars is the join itself. Hopefully you can see in this photo that the edge of the needle is a lot wider than the coil and a little sharp. It’s aluminium after all.

So the end result is snagging.

This is not unusual in circulars but incredibly frustrating. There are a circular needles which solve this problem, no doubt through exacting engineering, and as a result tend to be on the expensive end of the range.

So my opinion – good basic circular, perhaps for when you’re travelling and you don’t want to carry your prized expensive ones, but watch out for the snagging!

Thank you Red Heart and UK Crochet Patterns.