Summary:
Lovely needles – easy to work with. Starter pack does represent a good saving on buying the components separately. Only downside is the plastic wallet – quite a cheap feel to it, and not designed to accommodate new tips/cables as you add to your collection.
Detailed review:
Nickel Tips: Nice to work with. Not at all slippy like others have found. Quite the contrary in fact - the stitches feel nice and safe on the needles, and need a bit of a push to move along them. Not much of a push mind you - the stitches move along nice and smoothly. Some have mentioned the tips are cold, but I haven’t found them to be (but I’m used to metal needles anyway)
Cables: Really flexible. Stitches move along the cable easily.
Interchangeability: Great idea and no problems so far. Tips have screwed on to cables without difficulty and the tightening key makes them feel nice and secure. Join between tip and cable is very smooth, with no snagging.
Accessories: Tightening key feels very flimsy, but is probably up for the job – the tips and cables are very fine, so the tightening key needs to be too. I’ve used the short cable with an ender on one end when picking up some dropped stitches, and the enders seemed fine. Not as easy to screw in as the tips though, and I ended up with a slight ‘dip’ between the cable and the ender that some stitches could get caught on. I’m not sure whether this was just because I hadn’t screwed them well enough in. I was in a hurry and didn’t need them ultra secure, so I didn’t bother too much. They were a bit fiddly to unscrew again, but not a major problem.
Storage Wallet: Quite disappointing. Cheap plastic feel to it. The pack has 3 sets of tips, and there are 3 slots for storing tips. As it’s a starter pack, I imagine most people will be intending to add additional tips as they go, so would have expected some spare tip slots to accommodate these. The slots that are there are way wider than required for the tips themselves, so in theory you would be able to put more than 1 set of tips in each slot. I don’t fancy doing that though – too much risk of them scratching each other or getting mixed up. There are 2 front pockets that must be intended for the cables, but they’d need to be coiled quite tightly, and I think I’d prefer to relax them a little during storage. Ultimately, I think I’ll end up making a custom wallet to store them in.
________________________
I bought the Starter set, which has 4, 5 and 6 mm tips, and 60, 80 and 100 cm cables, all in a see through plastic wallet. Each cable pack includes a pair of cable enders and a key for tightening (i.e. the starter pack comes with 6 enders, and 3 tightening keys). I added extra 3mm tips and 150cm cable.
Date purchased: 18 July 2011
Purchased from: Art of Yarn
Last updated: 24 July 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment