Arm knitting.  I’d never heard of such a thing!  My friend Carol posted a link about it to my facebook the other night.   This was something I had to try.

So arm knitting is what it sounds like.   Your arms are the knitting needles.

I looked around a little and found a blog where there were tutorials for both an arm knitted scarf and an arm knitted blanket.  Of course, I wanted to jump in and immediately knit a blanket.  But then I actually stopped to think for a moment and decided that maybe I should not begin with quite such an ambitious project which would also require me to buy yarn.  I realized that I had the yarn in my stash to knit a scarf.  I found two skeins of chunky cotton/acrylic and a skein of worsted weight cotton.

I sat down with the videos and followed her guide.  She walks through doing a long tail cast on with her arms.  That was a little tough on my brain, so I had to turn off the video and visualize my arms as knitting needles.  Once I did that, I was able to figure out how to “cast on”.

After that, it was pretty easy.  It was a little hard at first to manage the three skeins of yarn, but then I put them on the floor so they could bounce around, and it wasn’t difficult at all.

David kindly helped me with the pictures.  I tried by myself, but with yarn loops on both arms, that wasn’t happening.  At all!

I’m pretty happy with my first result.  It takes awhile to visualize what’s going on. For awhile, I thought I just had a long stringy mess.  This is looser and more  “hole-y” then I would like.  It looks a little like a fishing net to me.

Davey modeled for me.

I want to do this again with more skeins of yarn.  I’d like to make a blanket that looks more like the rug from the first link where I learned about arm knitting.  He’s using at least 5 skeins of yarn I think, and his rug is much more solid looking.  However, I am currently in a “knit from my stash” mode, so this will go on my to-do list!  It’s really fun though. I’m not sure what you do when you want to take a break.  I did this in about 30 minutes or so, but I had to carry my 3 balls of yarn with me and leave the scarf on my wrist.  It probably wouldn’t be a big deal to run some yarn through the loops to hold them if I wanted to take a break.

It’s really relaxing though.  I liked the motion of moving the yarn loops from arm to arm.

Time to google more arm knitting ideas!