Nine minutes. That's how long my thumb let me knit.
Without another rigid brace that locked up my whole hand. Without another $2,000 in doctor visits for a shot I never even got. And without giving up a craft I've had going for most of my life.
If you read my last post, you already know how far the number fell — an hour, then forty minutes, then twenty, then nine. And you know what I did with the cardigan afterward. I didn't throw it away. I just couldn't have it in the same room as me for a while.
What I didn't get into is everything I tried before that Tuesday, and why none of it actually held. A few people asked, so here's the rest of it.
I'm what some of you call a process knitter — I've always liked the doing more than having the finished thing sitting there afterward. Which is probably why losing the ability to just sit down and knit for a while hit differently than I expected. It was never really about the sweater.
The drawer of things that almost worked
The first thing I bought was a rigid brace from the pharmacy near me. It did exactly what it promised — my thumb couldn't move at all. Which was the problem. I tried knitting in it once, got through maybe four stitches, and put it in the drawer with everything else I've bought and stopped using.
Next were compression gloves. They felt fine for about an hour. Then my hand started going numb somewhere around the base of my palm, and one night I woke up and it took most of the next morning before the feeling came all the way back. I stopped wearing them at night after that.
I ordered a soft wrap off Amazon too — the kind that looked almost right in the photos. The Velcro gave out within the week. Not dramatically. It just quietly stopped catching, the way things do when they were never really built to be used, just worn.
By the time my doctor brought up a cortisone shot, I'd already put close to $2,000 into the visits, an x-ray, and a specialist referral just to get that far. I didn't get the shot itself. Enough of the women in my own knitting circle had already told me theirs wore off in a matter of weeks, and I wasn't interested in spending more to be offered something that might not even hold.
None of it was that nothing worked. It was that nothing was built for what my hand actually does — over and over, hundreds of times a night.
That's the part that finally clicked for me, watching my own hands instead of just feeling the ache. It was never one bad moment. It's the same small motion, landing in the same spot, stitch after stitch — hold, guide, pinch, move, next one. A brace that locks the whole hand still doesn't touch that. Neither does a shot.
What I actually went looking for
Once I understood what the real problem was, I stopped reading comfort claims and started looking for one specific thing: something built around that exact motion, not just the joint underneath it.
The only three things I'd trust from that point on
- ✓Actually supports the joint that's failing — not the whole hand
- ✓Doesn't lock the thumb down, so I can still work a stitch
- ✓Holds up through a real evening, not just twenty minutes on a couch
That's what led me to Sorlelle. Not a claim about my thumb — the shape of it. It sits low, right over the one spot every stitch runs through, and leaves the rest of my hand alone to actually do the work.
It also came with a 30-day money-back guarantee, which by that point was the only reason I let myself order it at all. I'd already spent enough on things that didn't work. This was the first one where getting it wrong wasn't going to cost me anything else.
I'll be honest — I'd already been fooled by good photos once. So the first night mine came, I didn't try it on and admire it. I put it on and went straight for the piece I'd set aside — the one still sitting exactly where I'd left it.
My thumb didn't feel locked. It just felt held. I got through a full row, then another, and kept checking the clock without meaning to. At forty there was an ache starting — small, distant, not the kind that makes you stop. I kept going anyway, mostly to see if I still could.
I finished that piece four nights later. Not painless every row — but finished.
My granddaughter's wearing that one now — the good yarn, the one that actually mattered. And I'm already a few rows into the next thing — not the last one.
The one I actually kept wearing
Built around the one spot every stitch runs through — not your whole hand. The one that stuck, after a rigid brace, a Velcro one, and $2,000 in doctor visits that didn't help.
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