I, like many other knitters, dislike the process
of weaving in ends. I know there is a whole range of reasons and
feelings about this, ranging from a slight inconvenience to total
hatred. I feel I’m on the lower end of
that range. I just don’t like having to wait any more time to use a
finished project. Nothing is worse to me than finishing a pair of
mittens and wanting to wear them only to have to take another 10 minutes
to weave in the ends - I just want to move on to
the next project. This is also the reason I rarely block my knitting,
but that’s another blog for another day.
I obviously didn’t learn my lesson, however, as this is the state of my scrap blankets for the animal shelter.
Now, to be honest, I usually don’t
weave in the ends until I have a pile of finished objects and then I go
through and spend a few hours weaving in all the ends. I’ve recently
tried to start weaving in right when I’m finished
with a project or, even better, as I go. Recently, I knit a
fisherman’s rib scarf and I
wanted to use up some stash yarn. I wanted to use all of it and decided
some nice stripes would do the trick. I did the math
and weighed out enough yarn for each stripe. I knew I didn’t want to
keep track of the row count or anything like that, so I just cut the
yarn after each ball was the right weight. I decided on 7 yellow
stripes. This meant at least 14 yellow ends to weave
in (2 ends per stripe). Plus, the ends from the brown yarn for in
between the stripes. Altogether, I had 30 ends to weave in. Now, usually when I’m working a striped
project, I do my best to simply carry the yarn up the sides so I don’t
have to keep cutting and joining new yarn. That wasn’t an option for
this project as the stripes were quite wide (about 4 inches) and since the yellow was so bright against the brown, I
figured carrying the colors up the side would become very obvious and
not look great. I wanted to have the striped scarf, but I wasn’t
looking forward to having to weave in all those ends.
I eventually decided to be
proactive about it and weave the ends in as I go. This is something a
few knitters on YouTube/Instagram have mentioned, usually when they’re
working on scrap yarn projects like those scrap blankets
that are all the craze right now. I was knitting the scarf at work and
it was already pretty stop and go, so why not stop a little more
frequently to save myself the extra trouble at the end. It was
fantastic! I finished the scarf, only had to weave in
the end of the working yarn, and then I wore the scarf out of the
office that same afternoon.
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