Circulars and other items of vexation

You may recall from last week that I am using 13" needles. And that the reason for the length is that I am almost invariably manipulating one of the needles from more than halfway down -- 13" is longer than I need (but comfortable to wield), but I need at least 7" of needle length plus a few inches of grip.

With that said, let me digress a little into needle preference. (Go here for a brief description of different needle types.) When I first started knitting, all I had were straight needles. I then found circular needles, and was very much pleased. Significantly later, I found dpns -- being the dork that I am, the first project I ever tried them with (these, though the dates are off and I can't seem to find when I actually made them; it can't have been earlier than April 2007 though) were small items that started with 6 sts cast on (three needles, 2 sts per needle, first time with DPNs, good luck trying to tell whether or not the stitches are twisted!) and involved colorwork.

I may be a bit of an overachiever sometimes.

Regardless:

Once familiarized with all three (and with the magic loop / traveling loop technique of knitting small-diameter items on a long circular), my favorite to use and own was circular needles. They can be used for knitting flat, and in fact with long items (sweaters or blankets or shawls) are easier than straight needles because the bulk of the item can sit in your lap; they can be used for knitting in the round; and if you're doing a pair of items (like socks or gloves or wristwarmers) you can do two at a time.

(Yes, technically, you can do 2aat on DPNs, either by having two sets and alternating rows or by knitting one inside the other, but it's not the same.)

Or to put it another way, there is nothing you can do with straight needles or dpns that you cannot also do with circs.

...except, as it turns out, knit when you are in my current situation.

Here's the issue. Circular needles want to be as bendy as possible, to allow for the greatest -- pun unintended but unavoidable -- flexibility. Now, straight needles and dpns have to hold all the stitches you're working with, so to be of any ose, they need to be decently long. That's why you don't see many 5" straight needles on the market.

But for circs, the non-active stitches can rest on the cable. So the actual stiff needle part a) can be fairly short, because the cable is the primary holder of stitches, and b) wants to be fairly short, in order for the circs to form, well, a circle.

So the circular needles that you can get usually have needles that are 5" or smaller.

...you can see how this might be a problem, if I need 10" of needle to work with.

Can I hold circs? Sure. But the only comfortable position has one hand on the very flexible cable part, and thus unable to actually hold or manipulate the needle in any way.

At the moment, I have precisely two pair of circs that are functional for me. They were hand-made by a friend's son, by taking a straight needle (therefore of the length I need), chopping off the knob, whittling down the end a bit, and attaching a cable. Except he couldn't get the join smooth with anything smaller than a US7, and in any case the cable part is ... rather sticky. Not to the touch, but the stitches don't want to slide. At all.

I appreciate the hell out of these circs, for the effort involved and for the intent, but they have limited usefulness for me. And it doesn't help when the things I really really want to make are a) sock-weight yarn knitted to gauge (requiring US2 or smaller needles) or b) shawls with a fuckton of stitches (requiring a nicely slidy cable).

I love circs. I miss the hell out of them. And I really wish I could use them.

(current strategy I am toying with is to use normal circular needles with some sort of clamp so I can hold the clamp and the clamp holds the needle and I don't have to kill my shoulders, but I haven't found the right clamp -- something that holds securely without damaging the needle, something that does not require constant pressure to hold closed, something that is easy to open but does not open spontaneously, something that is fairly lightweight -- so that doesn't really work.)

(I have considered approaching some of the standard circular-needle manufacturers and asking if they can special-order -- well, special-make -- circs with long needle sections. But I am a wuss, and besides which the answer is probably no, and if it were yes they'd be frighteningly expensive, and did I mention I'm a wuss?)