Shirley, my apologies, as I am a man, and also knitting impaired, but how could anyone possibly use a 40 inch knitting needle? Or am I completely misunderstanding something here?
Mrs. Blather owns a knitting store so I know way more about this than I want. A circular knitting needle is two short knitting needles joined by a “cord” made of monofilament. In this case 40" is the length of the cord (that would be a really long one BTW). Circular needles let you knit a really wide garment or knit “in the round”. The trouble with regualr long needles is that the weight of the knitted piece is pulling down on the ends of the needles. Circular needles let the weight of the knitted piece sit on your lap. There are also flexible needles that are similar but the cords have knobs on the end and are not joined together. We have loads of flexible needles on sale right now.
Circular needles aren’t the straight ones–it’s like a cable or a wire joined by two knitting needle ends. You can knit really wide things, or very big tubes with them. They’re very handy for things like shawls and afghans.
Shirley, I probably would have made the same mistake. But hey, you’ll use them for something.
I’m okay with metric, but I once forgot that my bicycle tire pump was calibrated in bars and not 10’s-of-psi. My tires were rated for 100 psi, so I pumped them up to 10.
Unless a really heated exchange breaks out between pro- and anti- metric system nerds (unlikely, since 9 out of 10 nerds support metric), I’m thinking this thread will stay cordial enough for MPSIMS.