Episode 84: How to Make a Finger Knit Sparkle Cowl

Hi everyone, it's Jennifer from Fiberflux. In this video I will show you how to make a finger knit sparkle cowl. This is a really easy and fast project, especially for kids because there's no hooks or needles involved, and you just use your fingers as the loom. So I used one skein of the ruffle yarn for this project, and I have two examples to show you. The first, this blue cowl here, the finished cowl, was made with Patton's Pirouette, and that is 20 yards. For this tutorial I'm going to do the Red Heart Sashay, this is the purple one here, and this one measures 30 yards. You'll also need a pair of scissors, and if you're doing this with very young kids you'll want to do the scissors part. So let's get started. Move our cowl out of the way. So to get started, normally this yarn opens up and you make a ruffle scarf like this shown. We're going to use this regular yarn, just a very thick piece of regular yarn, and there we go. I just wanted to give that a fresh cut because it was unraveling a little bit. I'm just going to pull out some yarn, and again, finger knitting is a really fun project to do with kids. So what you're going to do is you're going to take your yarn tail, I'll just zoom out a little bit, and you're just going to hold it in your hand like this, just kind of clamp it down with your thumb, and you don't need your tail to be too long. This is about 8 inches or so. So what you're going to do is you're going to start wrapping the yarn around your fingers. See I went under my index finger, over my middle finger, under my ring finger, and then we're going to come around the pinky, and then do the opposite. Go over your ring finger, under your middle finger, and then come around your index finger. So now we have one loop on each finger. So let's come back across. Over the middle finger, under the ring finger, around the pinky, and come around, come back over, under, and over. So now we have two loops on each finger. So then what we're going to do is we're still holding our yarn, we're going to take these bottom loops and lift them up and over the loops that are on top. So just do this all the way across, and then we're going to wind the yarn, you can tighten everything up a little. Then we're going to wind the yarn around our fingers again, and let me just push this down, that helps to push it down each time. There we go. So let's go around our fingers, back across. So now again we have two loops on each finger, we're just going to lift up and over. And both the Patton's Pirouette and the Sashay, the Red Heart Yarns Sashay, is kind of a variegated yarn and it also has sparkles through it. So it makes a really fun and interesting project with a lot of texture and fun things happening throughout the yarn. So I'm just doing the same step over and over. Now you can make your cowl as long, again I'm just pushing these down after each pass, you can make your cowl as long or as short as you want it to be. The Ruffle Yarn has a shorter, much shorter yardage than a regular ball of yarn. So I simply worked mine until I ran out of yarn. So the Patton's again is 20 yards and the Sashay is 30 yards. So we're just going to keep doing this until we get to the desired length or we run out of yarn. Oops, my loop fell off, but I wanted to show you that. Sometimes that happens, just give it a twist and put it back on your finger. That seems to happen to me a lot, I guess because I don't push mine down far enough. But it's fine, you can just fix it, no big deal. And then you're just going to keep doing this over and over, and I'm going to do one more pass and then show you what we've done so far. So if you flip your hand over, you can see that we're getting a nice rope like this. Nice sparkly rope that looks kind of like this. So I'm going to leave you for a minute and let you work the rest of it. And I'm going to work the rest of mine and we'll just keep going until we run out of yarn. Okay, so we're coming up to the end of the yarn ball, just have a little bit of yarn left. I'm just doing a few more rows of this, just until now my yarn is almost gone, just going until I, not to the very, very end, probably get one more in here before I run out. There we go. And to get to the end of this yarn ball was about, oh, 20 minutes to a half an hour, I guess. So it's a pretty fast project and I just have a little tail left. And as you can see, this is the end where we started. As you can see, my rope has grown, so it's pretty long. So now, now that we have our tail and we've come to the end of our yarn ball, to get this off of your hand, what we're going to do is take the loop that's on our pointer finger and move it over to our middle finger, and then lift the bottom up and over, just like that. Then take this loop, move it to our ring finger, lift the loop up and over, off the ring finger, then take this loop and move it off of the ring finger and onto the pinky. So we have two loops left, then lift this one up and off, so we have one loop left on our pinky. So we're going to carefully slip this off and take your tail, just put it through the loop, just like that, and then just tighten, give it a nice, snug knot on that, and then I like to take the other end also, just give it a nice, firm pull, just to get everything nice and straight. So when you're finished, just want to kind of pull everything, get everything nice and straightened out, and the blue cow that I showed you has a knot. It's totally up to you, I thought it added a little bit of interest, so let's go ahead and do that with our purple cow also. Just tie a knot in it, and just give it a nice pull. You don't want the knot to be too big. And then, just wanted to show you the difference here. So this cow here, before we fasten it off and make it into a cow, you could make it into a scarf if you like, and kids really like this because they'll be very proud of what they've done. So I just wanted to show you the measurement on this. So let's go ahead and measure the finished piece. So this is measuring about 60 inches long for the sachet, and then this one, let me untie this one just to show you, the blue one, and this is with the knot, so if you choose not to do the knot, the scarf will be a little bit longer. So we'll just measure this all the way across, slide this back, there we go. So if we measure this all the way across, I'm getting about 35 inches on that one. So even though there's a 10 on the, that's the pirouette, so even though there's just a 10 yard difference, this yarn has the same sparkle as this yarn, but there's the added bulkier, I guess we could call this like a chenille through it. So let's finish off our cow. We have both of our cows here, and they both have ends, so what you want to do is you want to just tie these in a knot, just like that, make it nice and snug and secure. Let's do one more, just for good measure. Then you can just trim this, or you can take the end and kind of just weave it in with your fingers, just look for some of these holes in here and just kind of tuck them in like that, and then you can take your scissors, just trim that off like that, and we can take our other end, just kind of weave it in. Again you can just cut it off if you want to. This is going to be behind at the nape of the neck, so you're not really going to see it. There's like a trimmed knot, but I also wanted to show you how to weave it in. I like weaving it in, but it's totally up to you. Then you can just trim this end as well, this little tail. And then you have your cow, so that's your finished cow. Then you can do the same for this one, and just tie it into a knot, and I'll show you, this one I'll just cut off, so I'll show you the difference, how it looks, so you can see both. So you can just tie it in a knot and then just cut it, so you'll see these ends a little bit. So this is where we wove it in, this is how it looks if you don't weave it in. So you can see how much longer this one is, how much shorter this one is. So it's just a preference of how you want your cow to look, and I will say for this purple one that we did in sachet, you can give it a little twist and you can double it up so that it kind of, there we go, so that it kind of looks like that, sort of like a loopy necklace. This one's a little thicker and just goes once around the neck. So it's totally up to you. So that is how you make a finger knit sparkle cow. Thanks so much for watching, and be sure and click the red subscribe button to get all the latest FiberFlux video updates. Thanks again!