Any tips for straightening bent knitting needles?

I keep bending my double-pointed needles when I knit dolls and such. Its not too bad, but still it is noticeable and it bothers me that I cant bend them back exactly the right way.

Do you have any tips? I do not want to go out to buy more when they are still perfectly usable! :)

Silverlea

Unfortunately nothing really works.  I have heated mine in boiling water, then wrapped them in felt and put them in a clamp/vice.  They never got back to being perfectly straight.  Better to just bite the bullet and buy new ones and used the bent ones for other things.  

One of my uses is to use dpns as hair pins.  My hair is very long (bum length) and is thick and heavy so when I twist it up into a bun or french roll normal grips dont hold it.  Bent dpns do the trick perfectly! To bend the dpns i do heat them and then bend them over something small and round while gently pulling the points together.

Another use is to use them as a wire frame for amigurumi, if not a complete wire frame you could use a needle as a body to head stabilizer.

KatharinaV-NL

Well, there is a solution: treat your bent needles as if they where bent jewellery wire.
A jeweller has this problem too.
Have a look at how they fix it.

After hammering the big kinks out, its normally fixed by pulling the wire with force through a hole (woodblock or block of steel) that has the exact same size of the wire.
See YouTube for videos on that. You can search for "straighten wire jewelry".

;P Using the needles as hairpins is really funny!
I can relate to that!
But, as Im in The Netherlands, our knitting needles are longer than in most other countries: 43 - 45 centimetres. That would stick out too much, hahaha!

So Im going to take up that great tip of using such a thing for my hair bun.
Only mine will be a steel crochet hook :lol

Silverlea

lol @KatharinaV-NL  yup it is funny but it really works.  A crochet hook will get stuck in your hair if you dont snip the hook off ;P

Fonzie

Thanks all, I appreciate all of your replies! :)