How To Do Knitting: For Children

I'm going to talk about how to teach children to knit. Every child is different, so you may find that some younger kids are able to knit right away, and some older kids are not quite ready yet. Basically, you are looking for a combination of manual dexterity, so fine motor manipulation - the ability to use their hands to do fine delicate work, and attention span.

So you may have a child who can do really intricate, elaborate work with their hands but can't sit still for more than five minutes. Or you may have a child who is able to sit and read or whatever for long periods of time and has the attention span, but doesn't have the manual skills that he or she needs to knit. You need both of these things in place before a child is going to be able to successfully knit, because otherwise they tend to get frustrated and it could turn them off knitting for years to come.

So, the idea is to wait until both of those things are in place. In terms of materials, some people will automatically buy really big needles and really thick yarn for their children to practice with, and actually, that can make it harder for little people with small hands, more normal average thickness of yarn, maybe a DK or an aran weight yarn, and four or five millimeter needles work just fine for a child. However, you do want to get needles that are a little bit shorter in length, so that they don't have very long needles, you know, with their little elbows while they are trying to work the knit stitch.

Ages can vary but often times, children are ready to learn to knit between about seven and ten years old. I'm going to show you how I would show a child to knit. So, these are twenty-three-centimeter needles, these are a reasonable length for a smaller child to manage with their little hands as compared to something like this - a thirty-four-centimeter needle which is a more average needle length.

These are a little bit long for a child. I'm using a five-millimeter needle here and aran weight yarn. This yarn is not too fuzzy, we want it to be really clean, clear yarn, so the child can see each stitch individually, know where to insert the needle, and be able to manage the yarn a little bit more easily.

So, if you're teaching a child to knit, the first thing that you want to do, is make very clear the sort of left from right, so for the knit stitch for example, you always insert your needle from the left. So, if this is the stitch that we're dealing with, you're taking that right-hand needle to the left and inserting it back. The other thing that is really important to do with the child is to tell them how to hold the needles, because, if their hands are a lot smaller than ours, they have trouble manipulating the needles, so if you can show them that the right-hand needle can be placed under the left-hand needle in an X, and that they can hold that with their left hand so that they're then free to pick up that yarn and wrap it around the needle, that makes it a little bit easier for them.

They also need to be shown that, you have to hold the yarn against the right-hand needle, and provide enough tension or tightness on that yarn, that when they push the knit stitch through, that new loop will stay on the needle. Lots of children, when they wrap the yarn, they just let it dangle down here and then when they pull through, they're not able to keep that new wrap on the needles, so they need to be shown to hold tension on that yarn and push that new loop through, and then the loop comes off the needle. It's also important to mention to children where the yarn needs to be, so the yarn needs to be pushed to the back if it's a knit stitch, or pulled forward if it's a purl stitch.

That's something that it's easy to get wrong, even for adult knitters, and what will happen is inadvertently increasing or decreasing at the ends of the rows. And that's a brief introduction to knitting with children. All children are different and your child will pick