Finger Knitting

When my daughter was 6 or 7, she asked me to teach her to knit.  A couple of her little friends were interested, too, so I got the three of them together a couple times and showed them the basics.  My daughter was really interested - as long as I was sitting right next to her.  When I wandered away, she'd get a tangle or just get bored and wasn't quite interested enough to make the hobby her own.

Now she's 9 and a few months ago it occurred to me that she might enjoy a little finger knitting.  I got out a ball of yarn and refreshed my memory with a little video from You Tube, then showed her this very easy technique.  Minutes later, she was off and running, making gigantic snakes of finger-knitted yarn.  She looped her first project around and around to make a sort of thick loopy scarf and was quite happy with herself.  She then experimented with finger-knitting an extremely long tube, then finger-knitting the resulting tube into a shorter but much thicker snake.  Today she decided to see what it would look like if she held the yarn double, using two different colors, and she was quite pleased with the results.  This has been a good, quiet, portable project when we're on long car rides, and she can take it with her when we go together to watch her older brother play basketball or perform in a concert. 

If you have a child with a creative streak who might enjoy a new quiet-time activity, you can watch this video with him or her and learn together.

Just be prepared for an invasion of yarn snakes that are miles long all around your house!