Of all the examples of stripping away the unnecessary, arm-knitting has to be among the coolest and most sensual. Needles gone, YOU become the tool for making. 

This tutorial is a wonderfully clear how-to.

There are a trove of arm knitted items on Etsy, though curiously most seem to be tubular infinity scarves. We’re wondering about breaking out of that mould and pushing the limits of the arm-knitting idea. You could, conceivably knit, say, a really thick blanket, using inserting placeholders the thickness of your arms for the “arm needles” when you weren’t working.

And of course, someone else had the idea. Here’s a tutorial made by Jennifer West at PinkWhen: “I love the look of the chains, the thickness of the blanket, and the softness of the yarn.”  The thickness of the chains have awesome possibilities depending on the materials you use. Dig these shown at the Berlin International Design Festival.

Jennifer West/PinkWhen
Jennifer West/PinkWhen

Dig this wild arm-knitted blanket bag that “enables the wearer to choose between fully enclosing themselves in the piece for optimum warmth, or unbuttoning seams to free up their arms and feet. The wearer has full freedom of movement without leaving their blanket behind”.

James Parsons
James Parsons

Now we’re wondering if you could have two PEOPLE act as knitting needles, in a kind of dance, to make a whole-human-knitted creation…

via Swiss-Miss

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