Do You Need a Knitting Thimble for Colorwork?

A knitter in r/knitting posted a video in the summer of 2025 of three-colour stranded knitting flying along. A small ring on their left index finger was doing the sorting.

Three-strand colorwork had been kicking their butt. They'd tried the loop-of-wire kind before and it hadn't worked for them, but a Prym one was making a huge difference.

The ring is a knitting thimble, sold as a Norwegian knitting thimble more often than not. It sits on your left index finger with a channel for each strand, so two colours feed to the needle without crossing.

One reply in that thread put it plainly. It's just channels for the yarn to travel through, and the tension is still in how you hold the yarns with your other fingers.

If you knit Continental and want both colours in your left hand, that's who it's for. The video knitter had worked Continental most of their life and struggled with the main colour in the right hand. The thimble made three-strand work feel more like one-strand knitting. The same threads have plenty of people who put theirs in a drawer, though.

What is a knitting thimble?

Three kinds turn up in the threads, and all three cost a few dollars.

• A wire coil. A loop of wire wound round the finger, with rings on it for the strands. The LoRan coil is what a knitter in a 2021 video calls their favourite knitting tool. It's the kind the video knitter above gave up on, and another owner finds the cheap ones slide around and snag the yarn on their ends.
• A plastic ring. A ring round the finger with a flat top carrying the eyelets, which is how this kind takes up to four colours. Prym's is the violet plastic one, with a latch over the eyelets and a slit in the side that the maker says fits skinny and sturdy fingers alike. Owners with thin fingers disagree.
• A metal spiral. A coil of spring steel with two eyelets, which is the metal Prym, sold for Fair Isle and two-colour patterns. An owner of both kinds says the spiral stays on much better than the plastic ring, and they can't see how it would do more than two colours.

Who it helps

Continental knitters, mostly. Ten people across these threads knit Continental and reached for one. A knitter who normally works Continental found knitting the main colour English-style frustrating and picked one up to keep everything on the left hand.

One Continental knitter says the metal style makes colorwork a lot faster for them. Another, once they'd worked out how far to rotate it on the finger, says it sped up their colorwork a lot.

Twisted strands are the other thing it sorts. A Fair Isle knitter who works in coarse Shetland wool says the two strands would twist round each other while trapping floats. Holding both in the ring makes the yarn much easier to manage.

The thimble fan quoted below says it helped a lot with colour dominance too, because the loops keep the yarn separate.

I personally love my Norwegian thimble. It was fiddly at first, and you definitely have to watch out for it tangling when you're not using it, but I feel like colorwork projects just fly with it now.

u/buff_history, in r/knitting

One owner uses theirs for double knitting, and says they can double knit almost as fast as they knit a single colour.

It works as training wheels, too. One knitter who now holds a colour in each hand still recommends the metal one as a good in-between step, for the muscle memory and the feel for proper tension.

Another bought both kinds and found that over the course of one hat their fingers learned the strands. The ring went in the drawer, and comes out for getting back into rhythm after a long pause.

Does it fix your tension?

Ask the threads and you get both answers. The video knitter counts losing tension among the things it fixed. A Continental knitter with the metal one says it helps with tension, and the owner of both kinds says a thimble helped a lot with theirs.

Then the other side. One knitter tried the metal one and found the tension unequal between the two yarns, took a class, and now knits with a colour in each hand.

The thimble keeps the strands apart, and the tension stays yours. That's the reply from the first thread again, and two people asked for help with the tension part.

One buyer couldn't get the yarn to feed through and keep enough tension to pick it up with the needle. They asked whether they were meant to bend the ring. The person who started that thread said no: keep the index finger steady as an anchor and tension the yarn through your palm. It does take practice.

The 2024 asker was in the same place: no control over the tension, everything tangling, and the yarn falling out of the loops. One answer went to what happens before the thimble. Wrap each yarn once round your pinky, separately, before it goes into its loop, and keep the two balls in different bags.

The thimble fan quoted above wears the loops on top of the finger, pushed back out of the way. That way the top of the index finger controls the tension and the loops only keep the strands separate.

Who should skip it

Two-handed knitters have no use for it. Several people in a 2023 thread asking which thimble to buy answered that they hold one colour in each hand instead. One of them tried the metal kind, found it a poor fit, and says two-handed colorwork is the better technique for them anyway.

Anyone who puts the knitting down a lot may tire of it. One knitter got tired of taking it on and off every time, and learned to hold the yarn on their fingers instead.

Comfort cuts both ways. One knitter found their index finger got really strained at the first two knuckles and gave it up for two hands. Another says it makes their wrists hurt less when knitting.

On the right hand, a knitter who uses both kinds says the ring kind works with either hand. The metal spiral gives them more trouble on the right hand, and isn't as good for English-style knitting.

Getting it to stay on

Fit is the commonest complaint in these threads, and each kind has its own trouble hand. If your fingers are thin or your hands are small, expect to try more than one, because a ring that falls off takes your tension with it.

• The plastic ring on thin fingers. One knitter with tiny fingers loosely wraps a rubber band round the fingertip first, and that's enough to hold it.
• The metal spiral on small hands. Shop around. Somebody with tiny hands found several didn't stay on before one did.

Which one to try first?

No winner. The one firm piece of advice in the 2023 thread is that it comes down to your knitting style, and since they're cheap, get both and find out. That knitter works Continental and prefers the plastic ring, because it fits how they already hold the yarn.

The owner of both says the metal spiral stays on, and has used the plastic one for a three-colour project. One reply spotted a dollar-store multipack shaped like the Prym and suggests it as something to try out before buying a good one.

Start with the metal spiral if two colours is all you'll carry, the plastic ring if you want more than that or might swap hands. If it won't stay on, try the other kind or slip a rubber band under it. Then give it one hat before you decide.