Materials Required:—

A large cork, large reel, or a small piece of a narrow cardboard roller, strong pins, preferably those known as "laundry pins," a small crochet hook, colored wools.

This is known as rat-tail knitting, or cork or bobbin work. It can be made either by boring a hole in a large flat cork and setting seven or eight pins in round this hole, or by setting the pins into a reel with a large hole, but I have found the best thing is to get a small tube of cardboard such as paper is rolled on (out of a toilet roll, for instance), and to stick the pins firmly into the cardboard, as in Figure 25. Five or six pins will do. Take colored wool and loop it once round each pin, then wrap it very loosely once round the whole circle of pins, and, with another large pin or a small crochet hook, lift each loop up and over the last wrap of the thread, and over the head of the pin. Do this right round the circle of pins, so that you have now a second series of loops made from the thread which was wrapped round above the first ones, while the first loops have begun to descend into the tube. Work round and round till the end of your knitted rat-tail appears out of the tube at the lower end. You can knot on lengths of wool of other colors and make very pretty reins with them. You can, if you like, work with two differently colored threads, all the time using one color for the loops you lift, over a wrap thread of another color, alternating as you work round and round your circle. This is really just the way a knitting-machine works, very much simplified. You can do the same on a larger scale with a wooden ring into which pegs of wood are inserted, and this will make quite a large woollen muffler.