Spool Knitting with wire prep for tute

Today, I was asked a question about working with copper wire.

photo by Noreen Crone-Findlay copyright

The questioner had just gotten a fab deal on 24 gauge copper wire and snapped it up.

When she experimented with crocheting it, she found it to be not very pleasant to work with.  24 gauge is pretty energized, and fairly stiff.

Crocheting with it is mighty tough on the tendons.

She had seen that someone else had asked me to make them sturdy spool knitters for spool knitting wire and wondered if  the 24 gauge could be spool knitted.

Why would you spool knit wire?

Because you can make absolutely gorgeous jewelry with it!  Scrumptious!

I tend to use mostly 26 gauge wire for crochet and spool knitting, so I figured I had better give 24 gauge wire a try.

I tried it on the spool knitters that I had already made, and yes, it worked. BUT…. it seemed to me that it would work better with a different configuration on the spool knitter. One size doesn’t always fit all with spool knitters. In fact, it’s really helpful to have a selection of spool knitters in different sizes and shapes, with different numbers of pegs or nails.

By the way…. don’t try to spool knit wire on a plastic spool knitter, or on one with wooden pegs.

You’ll regret it…. plink, plink, plink…. the sound of breaking pegs…

I went out to the workshop and started working on a spool knitter that would work better for the 24 gauge wire.

photo by Noreen Crone-Findlay copyright

I used  some wonderful old wood that we had inherited from my husband’s Dad (Earth friendly… it’s an upcycled very very old handle that had parted company from it’s original tool. I have no idea how old it is, but it’s O L D and incredibly hard wood!)

Anyhow, I made her a different configuration spool knitter, with a larger hole and the pegs spread further out, and it works a fair treat with the 24 gauge wire!

It’s slow going to work with such heavy wire, but worth it.

I decided that I had better make a video tutorial about spool knitting with wire, because it’s a whole other kettle of fish than spool knitting with yarn.

But, I had also been working on getting the soundtrack re-recorded and edited on a couple of other videos that I have just made, and ran into frustrating techno glitches (grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr).  So… it’s way late, now, and when I tried shooting the spool knitting wire video under artificial light, it looked baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad.

I need to wait for daylight to shoot it.

Some things are worth waiting for…. and sunlight is one of them.

So is a tutorial sharing secrets of spool knitting with wire, so stay tuned!