How to Finger Knit a Blanket - video tutorial for complete beginners!

Hi there, this is Jess from Make & Do Crew and I've partnered with Lion Brand to show you how to make the Twisted Rope Throw, which is a finger knitting blanket made with no hooks and no needles, just your fingers. We're going to be using Lion Brand's Off the Hook yarn, which is a really cool yarn, sort of a chenille feeling that is these strands of loops that we're going to use to finger knit. You can get the full free pattern for this blanket on my website, which is makeanddocrew.com. I'll also link it right below this video. So whether you're going to follow my pattern or you want to just design your own, I'm going to teach you all the skills you need to make the twisted knit stitch here using Off the Hook yarn, and then you can apply them on a larger scale. We're going to work kind of small here to keep it all in camera, which is why I've counted seven loops right here. So if you're making the Twisted Rope Blanket, you're going to need 65 loops. And I like to put a stitch marker after the 65th loop because it helps me differentiate, this is my row of loops I'm working, and then this is my working yarn up here. So I put my stitch marker here, and it doesn't matter if you're left or right-handed, we are always going to start with the tail of our yarn over here on the left and our working yarn over here on the right. This is arbitrary, it just helps keep us organized. So once we've got our stitch marker, we are going to work these loops of our working yarn into the loops of our bottom row. And to do that, we would typically try to grab these loops without twisting them. But we're going to add an intentional twist as we go, and that's what's going to create that rope look. So first, I'm going to make sure that the loop is straight, and then I'm intentionally going to twist it to the left 180 degrees and grab the first loop of my working yarn. So it's the one on the opposite side on the other side of the stitch marker, and I'm going to pull that yarn through my bottom loop. So once I've got that through, the first row is really the trickiest and it will become a lot more intuitive. So hang with me here as we get this going. Our second stitch is going to correspond with the next loop in our working yarn. So I'm going to grab this one, it's straight, so I'm going to turn it 180 degrees, it's just a little twist with my fingers, and I like to just poke my fingers through this loop, and my kids and I like to call it, we're going to eat another loop. So we eat this one, gobble it up, and pull it through like that. If you pull it a little tightly, that's what helps keep things from unraveling. So we're going to grab our next loop here to the left, and the corresponding loop in our working yarn. I'm going to make sure it's straight, twist it 180 degrees, stick my fingers through, and eat up that next loop in the working yarn. So it's a bit hard to see the twists, but they will show up after a couple of rows. So our next stitch, we're going to make sure it's straight, twist it, put our fingers through, pick up the next working yarn loop, and pull it through. And as we pull the working yarn through, it's nice to just make sure that it's straight so that then we're ready to do the intentional twist on our way back in the next row. So I've got the next stitch, I'm going to twist it, stick my fingers through, and pick up our next working yarn stitch. And we've got two more here in this row, so I'm going to twist this stitch, pick up the next stitch, and pull it through. As you can see here, we're finishing our first row. We have one more stitch here, so I'm going to twist it. This one never looks quite twisted, so you're not doing anything wrong, it's just that it's at the end of the row. It will look more straight, but it looks fine in the blanket. So we've got our first row completed here, and we're going to work back the opposite direction without turning our work. Typically in knitting, you would turn your work and switch hands, but this is more like you're kind of a knitting machine where you're just going to zigzag back and forth, up as you go, and build your blanket row by row. So we're going to work our next row, we still have our working yarn here, we're just going to work back this direction. So I'm going to take my first stitch, make sure that it's not twisted, then I'm going to do that intentional twist, and pick up my first loop of working yarn. Again I'm going to pull it up, make sure it's straight, twist it, and pick up the next stitch. And grab that blonde hair of mine out of my project. I'm sure you can relate to that. So I pull this next loop up, and I twist it, and grab the next loop. So you can see it's already a lot easier because I finished that first row and everything's a little less wiggly. So again, if I looked at this and it was already twisted like this, I would want to straighten it out, make sure it's flat, and then twist it. It seems maybe a little bit tedious right now, but it becomes very intuitive as you're working. I've got that through, I'm going to grab the next loop here, twist it, pull through. And one of the most important things when you're finger knitting that you want to look out for is that you don't accidentally skip one of these loops. So a mistake that is easy to make would be to let this one kind of get lost in the mix, and then instead work into the next loop. And the way that you can tell you've made that mistake is if you flip your yarn over, especially after you've done a couple rows, and there's this loose loop hanging off the back. That is unworked. And you'll want to either...the sort of A-plus student thing to do would be to tear out your work and go back and pick it up. But I'm going to show you one other way I found. It doesn't look perfect, but if you find this loop and you really don't want to tear it out, if you're not much of a perfectionist, I'll show you one trick you can do. So let's pretend we skipped that loop. I'm going to finish this row of twisted knit stitches here. And as I get to the end of the row, we're going to work back in the opposite direction just as we have. What we want to make sure of if we find one of these is that we don't just add it in and work it as if it's another loop, because then we would go from having seven stitches here to having eight. So we could end up creating a triangle blanket, which might be cool on its own, but is not the intent here. So what I'm going to do here is take my working yarn, I like to kind of like move it back in the direction I'm headed. We're going to go right to left now, and I'm going to grab this first loop, twist it, pick up my working yarn. Now here's what I've learned about if you figure out, because these blanket rows are kind of long, if you're not a perfectionist and you just want to scoop up that extra loop that you left behind, and you don't want to tear out your row, here it's not that bad because it's only a couple stitches, but if it was way over here on a long row, one thing you can do is take the stitch that you do need to work, twist it, and put it on top of the one that you missed. So now we're going to kind of, if you're a knitter, you'll see this is kind of like a decrease, but what we're doing is trying to sort of absorb this mistake loop in our project so it kind of goes away, it is visually mostly hidden, and then we can move on and we don't have an extra loop hanging off the back. So you see there, it's kind of buried behind it, and it's good enough looking that, like I said, if you're not much of a perfectionist, this will be fine. If it's going to drive you crazy, just tear it out, and then work the stitches as you normally would. So once you've worked, in our blanket pattern, we're going to work to the end of the skein, so you're going to do six rows of each color. But I'm going to show you right now what happens if we want to switch colors, it's very easy, and this is going to follow our sort of mini version of the pattern here. So we've got two rows, you can start to see the rope forming, and what we're going to do is cut our yarn right here in order to create a new color. So we're going to clip right here, leaving ourselves two extra loops at the end of our row, and two loops seems to be a long enough amount that then you can weave in the tail at the end. And because the way these loops are worked is they're sewn down here at the bottom, we're going to really carefully just snip the strand that's holding this loop together to loosen it up. So we've got one, and then two here, and that's going to be our tail that we can weave in at the end. So now we're going to add a new color of working yarn, and to do this, we're going to check out how long is the tail at the beginning of this one. Looks like it could be a little bit longer, so I'm going to snip the very first loop here. And you can just lay it right on top, as if it was connected over here. And if you're someone who likes to tie knots in your work, you could tie these together. If you don't, you can also just leave them hanging and then weave them both in at the end. So for now, we're just not going to tie the knot, and instead, we're going to carry on with our next row, which because our working yarn is over here, is going to work in this direction, and we're just going to pretend that this is attached and that this is our new working yarn. So I'm going to take this first loop and twist it, and then changing colors is as simple as just grabbing my first loop of working yarn and pulling it through. And now we've already attached a new color. It's that easy. So I'm going to twist, grab the next loop, pull it through, twist, and pull it through. You can see this becomes really meditative because you're just using your fingers, and I find it's a great project to take with me like in the car because it doesn't require the hook or the needles or anything like that, and so I can just kind of use my hands while I talk or, you know, also look out the window, and it's just really zen, I find, and my kids love it too. So now we've worked another row. You can see we're starting to get that rope pattern. And now I would like to show you how to end your project because once you've worked all your color changes and your rows, you're going to need to cast off or bind off, sometimes it's called. So my first step is going to be cutting my yarn with the two loops like we've been doing when we do a color change. So we're going to leave those two loops behind, and again, I'm going to snip them at the bottom to turn them into a regular strand of yarn, and then we're going to start on the opposite side. So our bind off is going to start right over here, and this doesn't involve any twisting. This is instead going to work this loop, and then this loop, and then this loop, and we're going to work across toward our tail over here. So whether or not you're ending with your tail over here or over here, you're going to start on the side that's opposite of your end tail here. So I'm starting over here on the right, and I'm going to take my first loop and use it to gobble up my second loop. If you're a knitter, this is going to look very familiar to how you bind off in regular knitting. So I'm going to take my second loop now and grab my third loop, and you can see we're closing this off, so now your blanket can't unravel, and this is going to be the finished edge. So we're going to use third, grab the fourth, and we're going to continue like that all the way across, grabbing the next possible loop until we get to the end of the row. So we've got our last loop here, and the last thing we need to do is grab this loop, and we need to pull the last tail through that loop. And if you wanted to, you could snip right here, this loop, like that. It actually just came undone. That happens sometimes. So what we're going to do is, here was the loop that was in there, and I'm just going to pull this through. And sometimes, if you snip that last loop, what it allows you to do is pull this through a little tighter, like that. But if you don't do that, it's also fine, because you can kind of use your end when you weave it in, and kind of tuck any last stitch that's hanging off here and weave it into the corner, and it'll also work fine. So there's our finished very, very, very small blanket, and now I'd like to show you how we weave in our ends. So to weave in our ends, we're going to use a tapestry needle here. The bigger the eye it has, the better, because this yarn's pretty thick. And we're going to find a section of the same color as this. So I wouldn't want to weave this in up here, because we want to do it in the white section. So we're going to weave it through the chunkiest part of the stitches, which I think looks like it's on the back for this stitch. So we're just going to go through some of these loops here. Whoops. It's like a phantom loop, apparently. And our goal here is to tuck it in in enough places that then it doesn't come unraveling out. So we're going to do a couple in this direction. And then we're going to twist around. Make sure we don't go back in the exact same spot. Twist around and go back. I find the magic number tends to be about three times back and forth. So we're on our second pass here, kind of going back in the opposite direction. And then we'll do one more time. Because this yarn is so chunky, it kind of absorbs the look of this weaving in. So we'll head back this way for our third pass here. And then maybe finish under one more loop here. And then you snip your tail off and move on to weaving in the next tails. So I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial on making the twisted knit stitch with off-the-hook yarn. And I really hope you love that squishy blanket that you create. If you're a beginner crocheter, I've got a ton of free patterns and tutorials for you that are really easy to get started and make something that you actually want to wear. And they're on my site, MakeAndDoCreate.com. If you've learned a lot from this, I'd love it if you gave it a thumbs up and subscribed to my channel. Thanks so much for watching, and happy crocheting!