Knitting Thoughts and Ramblings
Weaving in Ends
One of the hardest things for me to teach is how to weave in ends. Patterns consistently give only the unhelpful “Weave in ends.” Instruction. Books rarely, if ever, cover the topic. I think that the vagueness in print and difficulty in teaching come from a combination of there being many ways to do it and that the right way and the wrong way to do it depends upon the situation.When faced with a student asking about weaving in ends I usually give three general pieces of advice:
- To weave in ends properly the following goals are achieved:
- The end is woven in so that it will not come undone and unravel your entire project - at least weave in enough so that when it starts to come undone you have enough yarn to reweave back in.
- The end is woven in so that it is not visible on the right side.
- Be aware where you leave ends to be woven in. For example, don't leave an end right in the middle front of a sweater or on the bottom of the foot of a sock, move it to the side of the sweater front or to the top of a sock.
- Notice when you've woven in an end in a way that pleases you. Remember how you did it and try to do it again. Remember where you did it and try to leave ends in a similar place again.
To help you develop #3 above, I will list some of my favorite places and ways to weave in ends.
My favorite places to weave in ends
- Into a cast on or bound off edge
- Into a "knit ridge" (the side of a column of knits next to a column of purls as in a rib)
- Into a seam
- Into fair-isle yarn carries (I'm sure that this will make a fair-isle purist cringe but I'm not a fair-isle purist).
- At the underarm of a seamless sweater
- Anywhere there is weirdness
My favorite ways to weave in ends
- The scooping method used for all places listed above. To 'scoop' follow these directions:
- Insert your darning needle from outside to inside into a knit ridge or cast on edge or anything you can
- Repeat step one above to scoop up many knit stitches from the column
- When you feel like it, pull the yarn through the stitches. Repeat as necessary
- Duplicate stitch
- Cleverly weaving in the end to fix a weirdness
After all of that I have to say that my current favorite way to weave in an end is to avoid it all together. I've finally started doing something that I read about 10 years ago and now I'm wondering what took me so long. Splicing is the way to go.
Here's how I splice:
- Untwist yarn end
- Separate plies into two halves
- Untwist the two halves for about 6"
- Do the same to the other end of yarn
- Take one half of each yarn end and twist them together
- If you'd like, knot together the ply halves next to each other (the used end from one yarn and the unused end from the other yarn) on each end of splice
To weave or not to weave in spliced ends?
It depends. I've found that if you leave the ends until you are done with the project they are fairly easy to deal with. Some yarns will felt together making it clear that you can just cut them off. Other yarns will want to be woven in. If in doubt, weave them in!
