Homemade French knitting doll ... ...

Me again, I've been knitting (again)


For Christmas one of the things my daughter got as a stocking filler was a little knitting doll (French knitting doll) I've seen these before, as I'm sure most people have, but in all honesty I've never actually attempted to use one, so the other day I had ago.

My daughters knitting doll -

She likes it a lot by the way.

It's not as difficult as I thought it might be, apart from the wool sticking to the inside of the doll it's pretty easy to use, although I'm not entirely sure what we'll do with all the knitted tubes, I guess we'll find a use, I've thought I might be able to use them in the garden some how.

I have found a use for the smaller tubes made with the actual knitting doll, it would seem they make good snakes :-) it's just a shame I'm not that good at this kind of thing.

Aaarrrhhhh snake ! -

Sort of snake like (ish)

My daughter is currently using it as a draft excluder for her dolls house.

Now as usual after using the knitting doll, I started to wonder how easy it would be to make my own, so that I can make larger tubes, this normally happens with a lot of things, I play about with them and then I start thinking I wonder if I can make one of these ?

As it turns out they are very easy to make, and you can use more or less anything tube like, I roughly turned a piece of scrap plywood into a circle shape on my lathe, then I cut the middle out, for the pegs I used some thick garden wire, so the pegs wouldn't bend very easily, and I pre-drilled holes all round the plywood circle them glued the pegs in.

This is what I ended up with -

Complete with knitting.

Not sure why I spaced the pegs in the way I did.

Pretty simple really, the principle is the same as the actual knitting doll, the main reason I made this one is that I intend to try knitting with string and thin wires, and I didn't want to break my daughters one.

I mentioned earlier that you can easily make one of these with more or less anything tube like, and so I thought I'd make another just to prove it.

For this one you'll need an old plastic bottle, some plastic plant labels and some sticky tape. Basically you just need to cut the top and bottom off the bottle, and then stick the plant labels round one edge, the more labels the more stitches.

Ingredients -

Ooops I forgot a picture of the sticky tape.

I decided I wanted 8 stitches so I cut my 4 labels in half, then taped them round one edge of the tube I'd made out of the bottle.

Like so -

Easy :-)

And that's it, one homemade (in about 10 minutes) and it works just as well.

I thought I'd try it out -

Kind of like a spiders web.

You don't have to sacrifice any pant labels either, just use some pencils or tape a few bits of dowel around the bottle, or what ever you use as a tube, the point is that you don't always need expensive equipment to have a go at some crafts, you can more often than not make some of the equipment yourself, you don't actually need anything to knit with, you can just use your fingers ;-)

Thanks for reading.