Knitting Needle Conversions

Sometimes you have knitting needles and you're not exactly sure what size they are. Either they're not labeled, or maybe they're not labeled in a way that you're used to, or your pattern's giving you one size of needle, but your needle says something else. So I'm here to explain all of this to you and explain knitting needle conversions. So typically in the US, you will find that your knitting needles have US sizes listed on them. And I have a chart here that lists most of the knitting needle sizes, not all of them, but most of them, the common ones that you'll find. But you can get knitting needles that don't have the US size on them, that have the metric reading or millimeter size written on them. And so here is a conversion chart that will tell you, okay, a US size zero is a two millimeter needle. And why this is important is that, again, sometimes your needles are labeled one thing or the other, or depending on the pattern you're following, if you are not in the United States, or you bought a pattern from another country, they might only list the millimeter size of needles that were used and then you need to know, okay, well, what does that translate to into the US size? So then you would use a chart like this to figure that out. And then what's nice too, is if you do have a needle that you don't know the size of, for example, I have this double pointed needle here, you can get these needle gauges that will actually tell you the size of your needle. So here I just have one that goes from a size zero all the way up to the size 17. And I would just take my needle and stick it in. And then it doesn't fit in this one but it fits in this one. So I know that my needle is a US size nine and a 5.5 millimeter. And you can see that matches up here. We have our US size nine and that's 5.5 millimeter. And then just quickly, I wanna just show you some other cute needle gauges that I have. So this is a handmade one that I bought. I thought it was cute, a mustache. I have this one that sometimes you'll find that you get these things at retreats or different conventions that you go to. This one I got from the Madison Knitting Guild knit-in that I taught at a few years ago. And then here's one, I'm from Illinois, and so I couldn't resist getting the needle gauge that had the state of Illinois on it. But all of these list both the US size and the millimeter size on it, or the metric reading, so that way you can figure out what your needle size is, and it's that matter if your pattern's giving it to you in a US size or in metric size, you'll be able to figure out exactly what knitting needle you need to use for your project.