An Easy Way to Make Your Own Knitting Needles

I’ve always wanted to try making knitting needles out of dowels. I actually bought some little dowels for the purpose. Then my daughter broke one and I was reluctant to try making needles with the dowel if it was so easy to break a 5-year-old could do it.

I’ll probably still try it sometime.

If you’re interested in making your own needles, a trip to the craft store will get you everything you need for this design from Try it Like It. The dowels are whittled down to a point, then wooden beads are glued to one end to make a needle stop.

You could make these in different sizes so long as you have a bead that will comfortably fit on the end of the dowel. The ones shown are both pretty large and pretty short, but you’re making them, so you can make them however you want.

Have you ever made knitting needles? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo via Try It Like It.]

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One great thing to knit when the weather is warm (or honestly any other time) is dishcloths and washcloths. They are fun and easy projects and a great way to play with new skills. Pretty washcloths make cleaning a tiny bit more fun, and they’re great to have on hand as a quick addition to a store-bought gift.

The Daisy Delight Dishcloth from Yarnspirations is a fun one for using leftover bits of green in your cotton yarn stash. What looks like the bottom in the picture is actually the left side as you knit it, and each little color section is worked with its own ball of yarn, intarsia style.

That’s a little fiddly for a washcloth, but the effect is cute, and it’s a simple way to learn the basics of intarsia knitting (as well as reading a chart) if you don’t already have those skills.

One the knitting is done, you add the flowers with a bit of lazy daisy embroidery, which is really easy to do even if you’re not that into embroidery. You could also potentially add flowers in duplicate stitch if you’d rather.

This may be the most work you’ve put into a dishcloth, but isn’t it adorable? It would be fun to use as a hand towel through the spring and summer, and if you already have some leftover green yarn from other projects it should be pretty easy to do.

You could also take this same concept and make it different colors. All dark green stems with stars on top might be reminiscent of Christmas trees, or brown with daisy stitch on top in different colors could be trees in the fall.

However you stitch it, this looks like a fun little project for knitters who are comfortable with intarsia and reading charts or who are ready to try those skills.

You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.

[Photo: Yarnspirations]

Book Review – Dishcloths for Special Days [Knitting]

Book Review – Holiday Knit Dishcloths

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