DIY Rainbow Knitting Needles

A tutorial! Just in time for Mother's Day!  This is another craft to either do with your kids or on your own. (Believe me, the kids make more mess, but they are also more fun).

 I love these colored wooden knitting needles from Knit Picks, but couldn't justify the price-- especially since I'm not a huge fan of wooden needles for anything but double pointed needles. I've come across a ton of tutorials for making knitting needles from wooden dowels... so I thought, why not make a few colored ones with the kids?

Supplies:

The supplies for this project are pretty simple (and inexpensive, thank goodness!) I picked up 1 quarter inch wooden dowel at my local home improvement store. 

I also had the following on hand:

• Kitchen Shears/Pruning Shears
• Sandpaper (steel wool or even a green scrubby from your dish rack will work)
• Pencil Sharpener
• Kids Watercolors or food coloring
• Beeswax or Olive Oil

Let's Get Started! 

First, using either kitchen shears or pruning shears snap your dowel into 7 inch pieces. I was able to get 6 equal length pieces  and used the leftovers to make a cable needle.  

Now, for the fun part! Grab your watercolors and kids and let them go to town. As you can see, my supply of water colors was very low, so I supplemented from my stash of food coloring. 

 If you want a little more control over the colors, try giving your kids just 1 or 2 colors to play with. But really-- you can't go wrong with project like this.

 Finally, hopefully, you'll have a few dowel peices that look like this. Let them dry while you clean up the kids.

 Using your pencil sharpener, sharpen each end of the dowels.

 Once they are sharpened, sand any rough edges down with the steel wool, and wax or oil the needles. I used this non-toxic wood wax recipe from Amber Dusick. It was easy to make, and I just buffed it in with a paper towel. I continued buffing until absolutely no color came off onto my towel. If your kids are a bit older, they can help with this part, as the wax is all natural.

For the ultimate test-- I was a worried that colors might bleed onto white yarn. I knitted what felt like a mile of stark white icord and no bleeding!

Now all that's left to do is to curl up on the couch with some yummy knitting. I cannot say enough how warm and fuzzy these knitting needles make me feel! Just knitting with them reminds of the fun we had making them. The needles are smooth enough that I find myself reaching for them just as much as my bamboo clover DPNs, but still grippy enough that I can also use them for straight knitting without worry of anything falling off.

And that tiny cable needle is my absolute new favorite-- it's small enough that I can hold it in my free fingers so it's always there when I need to cable.

Please do let me know if you all try this-- I'm absolutely thrilled with the result. And if you have a mom that knits-- how fun would it be to get these needles with some kid-dyed yarn? You could even wrap it up in an fun crushed tomato can!

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