How to Make Wooden Knitting Needles

If you'd like knitting needles with character, you might try experimenting with making your own. Making wooden knitting needles is easy: you can buy wooden dowels at your local craft or building supply store (take your needle gauge with you if you want a particular size), cut them to whatever length you like, use a pencil sharpener to create the pointed ends, sandpaper the whole needle lightly, and condition the wood with wood or mineral oil. Once you've done all this, you've reached the fun part of making your own wooden needles: decorating them with end knobs in the style of your choice. For this you can use polymer clay (best known by its most common brand name, Sculpey), a crafting clay that is baked in a kitchen oven.

This tutorial explains the needle-making process in more detail.

Polymer clay can be molded in any style or shape you chose, and then hand painted. The Babushka doll knitting needles above were hand made by Etsy vendor Sail on Baby.

These knitting penguin needles are both meta and quite cute. They are from the Etsy shop of The Clay Bean Co.

If your tastes run to the macabre rather than the cute, try your hand at making skull or zombie knitting needles.

And there's no need to confine your decorating solely to the knob ends of the knitting needles. It's possible to paint the needles themselves. You'll need to add a few coats of varnish once the painting is done to keep the paint from rubbing off onto your work. These striped needles are the work of Etsy vendor Soup to Knits. I've also previously posted about how to dye wooden knitting needles.

If you try making your own needles, have fun with it, and feel free to link to pictures of the results in the comments.