Welcome Back
Recently I shared a picture of the lovely new James Brett yarn I bought, today I’d like to share how I found the Birch wood circular needles.
Needles
Well that’s a whole story in itself. Regular readers will remember how much I adore my Brittany birch needles, this has not changed but I wanted to knit a cowl and possibly mittens later on, so I needed circular needles and sadly Brittany do not make them. Knit Pro are scorching the search engines and other than bamboo or VERY expensive Lantern Moon needles, are all that were around.
Thanks to Irlens syndrome which is what causes my dyslexia, I cannot focus on busy backgrounds, so found Knit Pro’s Symfonie needles far too bright. The only way to try their rosewood circular needles was in complete sets and the wood on those is very dark. The other thing that concerned me about the interchangeable needles was the very short amount of wood that was left visible in the larger diameter needles. The overall length of regular interchangeable needles is said to be 11cm, but this includes the metal attachment section at the rear of the needle. In the larger diameters by the time you take off the metal section and the pointed end of the needle where it tapers, there was precious little wood before your hand rests on metal. So although they do look like an excellent idea, my dexterity was not going to cope well with so little needle to get hold of, any more than my wonky eyes could cope with the patterning.
THEN, after a visit to the Knit Pro European website ,I discovered that the manufacturer also make an uncoloured fixed length circular needle. The name is Basix, in fact the Basix range also includes straight needles and like Symfonie the name is for the colour way. These are lovely, birch wood, light in colour, warm in the hand and a decent length at 15 cm long 
After searching online, I found they are stocked by Art of Yarn and I bought mine from their Ebay shop. I’m very pleased with them and will be writing a full review of them once I’ve had a good play with them.
Knit Pro: Basix; Fixed Length Cirular knitting needles
At last, nice quality needles, well made and no busy or dark patterning. I did email the company but at the time of writing they have no plans for producing the range as interchangeable needles. On the upside this has resulted in a better ‘in hand’ length of needle, so I’ll take the hit of having to buy lots to get the different sizes. Check out the links below for more details of the retailer and the sizes available from Knit Pro.
Links
- Knit Pro EU Basix needles
- Knit Pro Basix Birchwood needles at Art of Yarn
- Art of Yarn
- Art of Yarn on Ebay
Best wishes and thank for reading, see you soon
Billie
