A pattern typically only provides you with a size, aka the diameter of the needle. The rest is up to your own preference. Your knitting needles need to be long enough to accommodate all stitches without them being squeezed together so tightly that they fall off whenever you relax. So, your first step should always, I repeat, always be knitting a gauge swatch to confirm you are knitting a satisfying fabric in line with your thoughts or the requirements of your pattern. what size knitting needles for beginners So according to the yarn comparison chart a pattern using a US 9 will be used to knit a worsted or heavy weight yarn and a Canadian/Uk 9 is more likely to be used to knit with a finer yarn (probably a fingering).

Susan Webster concludes in a noteworthy post that “then, somehow, magically, around the time of World War II, needle and gauge markers united around the “Standard American” size”. She argues that it could be a result of wartime restrictions. Decades of confusion among knitters might have elevated that demand.That, of course, does not explain the conundrum of the US needle sizes. Why don’t they follow the Imperial system? To be quite honest, nobody really knows! It remains a fact, however, that from around 1900 US manufacturers started selling their own needle gauges – following no system at all. Or rather, the actual sizes followed (more or less) the Imperial system but the numbers were rising, much like the metric system popular in mainland Europe. Knitting needle sizes can be confusing. That’s because different countries have different ways of numbering their knitting needles. As seen below, these are Addi flexible double pointed knitting needles (DPNs) used for circular knitting. Notice the label indicates the knitting needle size and/or the millimeter (mm) measurement. In the US, needle sizes start at 0 and increase to 50. However, in the UK, sizes start at 14 and go up to 000. This blog post is all about knitting needle sizes and conversion charts. Why is this so important to know?

Explaining U.S. knitting needle sizes is a complicated topic and we have to delve a bit into history: With the popularization of knitting in the UK in the 18th century and the industrialization, the shift from handmade tools to mass-produced steel needles occurred. Needles were often also called wires because, by then, most dpns were indeed made out of durable steel wire. And thus they were measured in accordance with the standard wire gauge (SWG). I tend to use metric sizes as no matter where you are 2.0mm is still 2.0mm, and here in Australia most of the patterns you buy will list both the metric size and the equivalent United Kingdom and/or Canadian size.The yarn label of the most commercially produced yarns should provide you with a size range. It has to be noted that these kinds of recommendations are only a first step. The right needle size for you will largely depend on two factors: This first knitting needle chart is broken down into four columns. The first column lists knitting needle sizes in millimeters (mm), which is how Australia (AU) and New Zealand (NZ) list their sizes. Given the many immigrants (but also the rising economic power) from Germany, this mixture cannot be seen as all that surprising from a certain point of view – especially as it feels a little bit more intuitive that a larger number constitutes a larger size. It would be very limited to assume the U.S. only imported haberdashery from the UK. After all, companies like addi have been selling fine knitting needles since 1829!