Finger knitting for kids

Finger knitting is a fabulous and easy craft for kids of all ages (from around the ages of 5 and up, but younger kids may be capable also). It’s a simple stitch, requires no experience or expertise, no equipment other than yarn and scissors and it is much, much quicker and easier than traditional knitting. It’s similar to french knitting with a similar result, but quicker and easier than that too.

If you’ve never finger knitted before fear not. I had never finger knitted before either until my youngest daughter (who was 6 at the time) showed me how. She had picked it up by watching some older girls at school finger knitting, and then came home and knitted a length that could literally wrap around our whole lounge room twice!

In this post my girls are showing you how they finger knit, with simple step-by-step pictures. Some of the future projects we have planned have finger knitting as one of the steps so I thought it would be useful to have a single post with the basic stitch explained.

You can do finger knitting with just one finger, two, three or four depending on how thick you want your ‘rope’ to be. Today we are explaining two-finger knitting because that’s what my eight year old felt like making at the time.

You Will Need

• Yarn – any thickness will do but I personally love using the bulky kinds (8ply and up)
• Scissors
• Your fingers

How To:

1. Clamp the end of the yarn between your thumb and the palm of your hand. If you are right handed clamp it in your left hand, and if you are left handed do the opposite.
2. Create a figure eight with the yarn around your first two fingers.
3. Create a second figure eight directly above it.
4. Leaving the second loop in place, lift the bottom loop over the top of it and slip it off the end of your finger, repeat with the second finger.
5. You can now let go of the end which has been clamped between your thumb and the palm of you hand. Give it a gentle tug.
6. Repeat the stitch by making another figure eight, lifting the bottom loops over the top loops and slipping them off your fingers.
7. Continue knitting using this technique.
8. When you are happy with the length, slip both of the loops off the ends of your fingers and hold them in one hand.
9. Snip the yarn with your scissors and thread the end of it back through both loops, gently tugging the end of your rope.
10. You’re all done!

Finger knit using one, three or four fingers by extending the figure eight to include the next two fingers, or reducing it to include only one.

Here is my younger daughter finger knitting with four fingers:

You can see how super simple it is. If you have knitted a length and wish to come back and continue it later a simple trick is to slip the ends over felt tip pens in place of your fingers. Connector pens work brilliantly for this purpose because they snap together and your knitting won’t slip off the ends.

Now go on, try it yourself.

More fun craft ideas using yarn:

• Traditional yarn dolls are a simple and inexpensive DIY toy
• Make a woven butterfly using craft sticks and yarn
• Make your own DIY pom pom maker using a scrap of cardboard

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