Craft · Hands

Your thumb joint moves about a thousand times an hour while you knit.

Nine things to change before you change what you knit — and the one thing technique cannot fix.

Knitters United · Reading time 6 minutes

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Everyone who has knitted for long enough knows the twenty minute mark. It is the point in the evening where the ache at the base of your thumb stops being background noise and starts deciding when you put the work down.

Most advice for it amounts to one word: rest. And rest works, right up until you start again. You know this already, because you have rested, and it came back on the first row.

This is the other half of the problem. Not what to stop doing, but what to change about how you knit, so the twenty minute mark arrives later in the evening. Almost none of it costs anything.

First, why it is almost always the thumb

At the base of your thumb, where it meets the wrist, there is a small saddle shaped joint. It is what lets your thumb swivel and oppose your fingers, and it is the joint doing the work every single time you pinch a needle, tension yarn, or hold a hook.

Here is the part that matters. It is not one large effort. It is a very small movement, repeated. A knitter working at a comfortable pace makes something in the order of a thousand pinch and release cycles in an hour. No single one of them is remarkable. It is the thousand that is.

Once you see it that way, there are only two things you can actually do. You can reduce the force of each pinch, or you can reduce the number of pinches. Everything below does one or the other. It is worth knowing which, because it tells you what to try first.

If your hands complain from the very first row, you have a force problem. If they are fine for an hour and then fall off a cliff, you have a count problem.

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1. Go up a needle size before you change anything else

Force

The thinner the needle, the harder you pinch, both to hold it and to stop stitches sliding off the tip when you do not want them to. Moving from a 3.5 mm to a 4 mm does not sound like much written down. In the hand it is a noticeably fatter object, and a fatter object can be held loosely.

Swatch it, adjust for the gauge change, and judge it on how the first hour feels rather than the first ten minutes. This is the cheapest change on the list and the one most people skip.

2. Put the weight in your lap

Load

Straight needles make your hands carry the project. By the time a sweater back is twenty centimetres long, that is real weight held out in front of you for hours, and the muscles doing the holding run straight through the base of the thumb.

Circular needles let the fabric sit in your lap instead. Use them even when the pattern is worked flat. Knit back and forth on a circular and the only thing your hands hold is two needle tips. For most knitters this is the single biggest comfort change available, and it changes nothing about the finished garment.

3. Let bamboo do the gripping

Force

Metal needles are quick because stitches slide. The trade is that you pinch harder to stop them sliding at the wrong moment. Bamboo and wood hold the yarn very slightly, which means the needle does a share of the gripping for you. You give up a little speed. Most people stop noticing within a week.

4. Blame the yarn before you blame your hands

Force

A splitty single ply has to be worked precisely, and precision means a tighter pinch, because you are bracing against splitting the yarn on every stitch. A smooth, well plied yarn forgives an imprecise stitch, so you stop bracing.

If one project has been unusually hard on your hands, look at what it is made of before you conclude something has changed about you. Often the yarn changed, not the knitter.

5. Chunkier is not cheating. It is arithmetic.

Count

This one has the largest single effect, and it is the one knitters resist hardest, because it feels like a concession. It is not. Look at what actually happens to the repetitions.

Same garment. Roughly sixty per cent fewer pinch cycles to finish it. You have not knitted less. You have knitted the same sweater with far fewer repetitions of the movement that hurts.

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The thing none of the above can do

Every change so far adjusts what you are holding, or how much of it there is. None of them change what the joint itself does while you are working. It still swivels. It still pinches. A thousand times an hour, whatever needles you are using.

That is the gap we built for.

The Knitters United Thumb Stabiliser is one piece of knitted fabric with a soft cushioned oval built into the palm side, sitting directly over the base joint of the thumb. It pulls on like a sleeve. There is nothing to fasten, nothing to position, and nothing to adjust halfway through a row.

All four of your fingers stay completely bare. So does the top knuckle of your thumb, and your wrist. Yarn tension, hook grip and needle work feel exactly as they always did, because nothing is touching the parts that do the feeling.

Why the last brace you tried did not work

Most knitters conclude that bracing does not work for them. Usually what actually happened is that every one they tried held a different part of the hand than the part doing the work.

What you tried	What it actually holds
A standard wrist brace	The wrist. Leaves the thumb free to keep moving.
A rigid thumb splint	Everything, including the parts you knit with.
Compression gloves	Nothing structurally. They squeeze the whole hand evenly and put nothing over the joint.
A twelve dollar neoprene splint	Briefly. The seam is where the strap load concentrates.
The Knitters United sleeve	The base of the thumb, and nothing else.

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6. Lever knitting, and the Shetland belt

Force

In lever knitting, also called Irish cottage style, the right needle does not move. It is anchored, tucked under the arm or seated in a knitting belt worn at the hip. The right hand then works the yarn around a fixed point rather than gripping and lifting a needle.

The effect on the hands is significant, because the right hand stops carrying and steering the needle altogether. Shetland knitters have used leather belts stuffed firm with horsehair, drilled with holes to seat a long double pointed needle, for generations. It is a genuinely different motion and it will feel wrong for a fortnight. If you try one difficult thing on this page, make it this one.

7. Portuguese knitting, if it is the right hand

Force

In Portuguese knitting the working yarn is tensioned around the back of the neck, or through a pin worn at the shoulder, rather than by the hand. The left thumb flicks the yarn over the needle and the right hand does very little. If your trouble is concentrated in your dominant hand, and particularly if purling is what finishes you off, this is worth an evening of your time. Purl is the easier stitch in this style, which is the reverse of what most knitters are used to.

8. Set up the chair, not just the project

Load

Hands work harder when arms are unsupported. If your elbows hang free, your shoulders and forearms are holding position for the whole session, and the fine grip at the end of that chain tightens to compensate. Get your forearms supported, with armrests at the right height or a cushion across your lap to bring the work up to you.

And light. Straining to see stitch definition in poor light makes people knit closer to their face and grip tighter without noticing. Better light is a hand intervention, oddly enough.

9. Stop before your hands do

Count

Most knitters stop when it hurts. By then the tissue has been loaded well past the point where it was going to complain tomorrow as well.

Try ending the session on a timer instead of on a signal. A set number of rows, or a set time, decided before you sit down and honoured even on the evenings you feel fine. Two forty minute sessions with something else in between will very often give you more finished knitting in a week than one long evening followed by two days off.

Keeping two projects going helps here. One fiddly, one mindless. When the fiddly one starts to bite, you swap rather than stop.

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What the sleeve will not do

You have been sold to by this category before, so here is the part most brands leave to the returns page.

• It will not replace a conversation with your doctor. If you have been told the joint is bone on bone, or you are weighing surgery, this sits alongside that decision and not instead of it.
• It is not a rigid splint. When a joint genuinely needs to be held completely still, a rigid splint is the right tool and this is not it.
• It will not stop finger joints hyperextending. It cushions the base of the thumb only and does nothing further down the hand.
• It will not work if you size it wrong. A sleeve that misses the joint cushions nothing. Measure your palm before you order.

If any of that describes your hands, we would rather you kept your money. If none of it does, the rest is simple.