Monday, February 24, 2014

Arm Knitting!

A month or two ago, I saw a picture of the neatest scarf a friend of mine had made. She claimed to have "arm knit" the whole thing in under an hour, which intrigued me. It turns out that "arm knitting" is a thing, and that some genius somewhere has figured the whole thing out. Browsing the aisles at a craft store the week before Morgan came, I came across the yarn and was again motivated to try this craft out. She was game, so we hit up Hobby Lobby for yarn the day after her arrival. 

You will need:
2 skeins of yarn (chunkier is better for a thicker scarf, but we went with medium-width yarn)
Scissors
Access to YouTube
Patience 


First, open both skeins of yarn. You'll be using them simultaneously, which I didn't understand when we first began.

Measure out six arm lengths

Get ready to watch, start, rewind and pause YouTube a million times.

I think you can watch the video by just clicking right here. There were lots of tutorial videos, so we chose the shortest one.


You'll begin by casting on. It's just like regular knitting except you use your arms instead of needles. You will forget this time and again and get frustrated and want to quit until this seeps into your brain.

From there on out, you'll knit, transferring the yarn from one arm to the other. Make sure you've gone to the bathroom and done whatever you needed to do before this, because your hands are going to be tied together until you're finished.

My laugh here was an annoyed laugh. I felt like there was quite the learning curve.

But somehow I got the hang of it and ended up with quite the headdress. The tutorial suggested that we do 24 rows before ending it but I measured it on myself and determined that 24 was not enough. It would have been, but I kept going and ended up with a really long scarf (not a problem - I wrap mine around 3 times),

Morgan's scarf, finished! Before she snipped the ends.

And here are both of our scarves. I love the gold of hers and might copy her and make a new one now that I get the hang of it.

Make one of these! We found yarn at Hobby Lobby, but I noticed that there's great yarn (and cheaper yarn) at Wal-Mart too!

3 comments:

  1. They are gorgeous! How I wish I could have the time to return to crafts. When I was a teenager and your adult, I knitted sweater and crocheted a bedspread. Then, work interrupted my life.

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  2. I want to learn how to do this but I'm not crafty at all and have no idea how to knit so I'm not sure I could even figure this out but I love the concept!

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  3. wow! no joke, i just googled arm knitting like last week...then decided it looked too complicated. lol, you've inspired me to try again!

    ReplyDelete

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