Invitation to Create: Finger Knitting

Finger knitting was my final invitation to play during our week of school holidays.  Strictly speaking, I’m not sure it was an “invitation to play”.  I didn’t put out materials and wait to see what happens, like you would usually do when creating an invitation to play.  I used another technique to get my children interested – I sat down and started a project myself.


To interest my children in finger knitting, I sat on the couch, at a time when I knew my boys were at a bit of a loose end as to what to do, with a few enticing coloured balls of wool and started finger knitting.  Lo and behold, I had two boys wanting to know what I was doing and whether they could try it.

I chose finger knitting because my youngest took the left over wool from our magic wand creations and started pretending to knit. 

I’m not going to provide a tutorial here.  Last week, I had no idea how finger knitting was done.  I knew of it as part of Waldorf schooling and I knew that it was considered something young children could do.  So, I googled how to finger knit and landed on this beautiful blog with a tutorial – flax and twine.

Finger knitting proved to be a bit challenging for my 4 y.o. to do independently.  He had a short try, heavily supported by me and then went back to pretend knitting with balls of wool.

My oldest loved it.  He has knitted scarves for himself and his brother and both of their teddies.  They are short scarves.  I’m not sure he really knows what a scarf is, there is not much need for them in our tropical climate.