Welted Hand Puppets

I play with new ideas and new stitches all the time. Sometimes I just make swatches but sometimes I keep going and complete a project. The puppets came about on a whim.

I was practicing welt stitching and continued up the tube to make a hand puppet. I named him Marli. The dog thinks Marli is pretty funny. Marlie is the brown and blue guy on the right. I haven't named the orange, green, and ivory guy yet.

I really enjoy making welts. I started with the garter stitch welts. That's where you knit a set amount of rounds then purl the same number of rounds then knit again that number of rounds and then purl again. Doing it in the round makes it really easy. I wanted different colored welts and I learned that it's better to knit a round of a new color before starting the purl rounds or you get a line of dashed color.

Mixed in with the knit/purl welts are rounds of casing style welts, where you knit several rows then go back and pick up three or four rows down. I had tried this before years ago and found it tedious and horribly confusing to keep straight when trying to find specific bumps on the backside. There is a method of doing it that makes it so easy and the row just flies by.

While looking at the front of the work, if you take a look at the stockinette stitch you will see a bar on the backside of the V. To do the casing style welting, insert knitting needle from the back into the stitch along the row you want to use and move needle up and away and you will grab that bar, which is the u bump on the backside of the work. What makes it so awesome is that you can see what you're doing. You grab that bar in the row you want and place that loop onto the needle and knit the two stitches together, grab the next bar, pull that loop up and knit two together. It works up so fast and you can see exactly where you are working on the rows below. You can work a complete row or just part of the row, which gives a wrinkled effect. Pretty neat.

To make the puppet, just knit a tube for about 6" then work half the stitches flat for a few inches then decrease until there's 6 or 8 stitches left and bind off. Work the other half of the stitches in the same manner. Knit flat a mouth by repeating the knitting done on the separate halves and sew that piece inside.

I tried getting a picture of them with my hand inside but it was sort of like rubbing your head and patting your belly at the same time and the pictures turned out pretty blurry. I'll recruit a hand model and try again to capture a picture. They fairly come to life with a hand inside.