Most standard knitted sweaters I’ve seen use falry thick yarns. What’s the finest weave/yarn you can usually hand knit with?
Also as a side question the best man made knitted sweaters I ever had were some thick Pendleton sweaters 30 years ago I got from a camping -outdoor supply store Hudson Trail Outfitters near Bethesda/Rockville MD, with super dense yarn, and it even had (IIRC) a some lanolin still in the wool. Can a human knit sweaters this good?
I don’t know yarn sizes, but a couple of years ago when visiting the Mayflower II in Plymouth, MA, one of the female re-enactors was knitting a lightweight stocking using very thin needles and a very fine yarn. (Unravel a sock to see approximate yarn weight.)
It would take forever to knit a whole sweater that way, but it could be done, I’m sure.
Think of a yarn stitch like a pixel. A sweater made with a thick yarn has fewer “pixels per inch” than a yarn made with thinner yarn. The fineness of the knit is indirectly proportional to the number of stitches you’d have to make.
So the limit to the fineness of a hand knit is yours to decide. Given enough patience (and wine), you can probably accomplish more (measuring quality here, not quantity) by hand than by machine.
Awesome. The “upgraded” hamsters just ate a post that took me about 15 minutes’ work: gauges, stitches per hour, relative density of different projects . . .
I hope you kept the receipts, Ed.
Knitting very very tiny sweaters for the movie Coraline.
I’ve knitted socks using fingering-weight yarn and size 1 needles, which results in a fabric with about 8 stitches per inch. However, that’s not nearly as fine as you CAN knit. The thinnest yarn commonly available is described as “lace weight”. Knitted on size 0 or 00, that would produce a fabric of 10 stitces or more per inch. There’s no reason you couldn’t knit sewing thread on size 000 or 0000 needles for an even finer fabric. You hands might cramp, and you’d probably die of boredom before completing the project, but it’s doable.
Note, link goes directly to a youtube video.
The finest thing I have knitted is a pair of socks on size 1 needles (2.5 mm) with fingering weight yarn (which is about the width between these two I I s).
I knitted these baby booties with a bit thicker yarn and needles (sport/baby weight yarn).
However, as someone above said, the thinnest yarn is known as laceweight. Here is an example.
Here are a bunch of examples of items knitted with laceweight yarn:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9387982@N02/3292091755
http://www.flickr.com/photos/58159065@N00/3250629739
Now that’s been answered, how fine can machines knit?
Think nylons or fine t-shirt material. I’m sure that machines can probably go finer, but I don’t know if there’s much demand for it.