My friend Denny? She loves weaving in ends.  Loves. It.  All of her peers have used this to our advantage.  Barters, trades – casual arrangements, we’ve all taken advantage of Denny’s proclivity for finishing ends up in one way or another.  (In the past, we have even done things like strategically leaving a piece of knitting lying around with the ends showing. She can’t resist. She’ll weave them in out of reflex. It’s like a disease.)  Denny can’t tell you why she likes it, exactly.  She says it’s satisfying, she thinks it’s fast and fun, she enjoys the sense of closure it gives her to tidy things up and make them all nice.   Something like that.

I am nothing like Denny.  I hate weaving in ends.  I accept that it’s part of knitting, and I don’t hate weaving in ends enough to let it shape my choices – not like knitters who hate seaming enough to let it put them off a sweater knit flat, but I have it in the same category for fun as peeling potatoes or washing the coffee filter.  Something you have to do if you want to do something else.  Like have coffee, or potatoes, or a sweater.

Last night I was sitting there on the couch, tidying up a wee sweater that sort of materialized around here over the weekend.  My mum, who really isn’t the sort of mother who gives you choices when she wants you to do something, told me that I was going to be making a sweater for a baby who’s special to her.  Her friends hadn’t known what flavour baby was arriving, so they got a lot of yellow and green and white, and Mum’s only request was that the sweater not be baby colours like that.  This means that I was given carte blanche.  I could do anything I wanted, and I took full advantage of this to have a little fun.  I decided what I would do, that it would take two colours, and I called up The Purple Purl and told Jennifer that I needed two colours for a baby boy and she could do whatever she wanted, and that someone would be by later to get it.  She chose, Joe transported it home, and that night I started a sweet little sweater, and remember, I could do anything I wanted. What I wanted to do surprised  me, and got me thinking. What did I do for that sweater?

Stripes. Lots of them. Even pulled the work out and rejected six row stripes in favour of four row stripes, and then chose to cut the yarn at the beginning of every change because a) I think it makes the change point look better than carrying the yarn up without cutting and b) THAT WAY THERE ARE AS MANY ENDS AS POSSIBLE.

I sat there last night, weaving in end after end after end… and I was thinking that I hated it, and then I thought about it.   For a knitter who knows she’s not a masochist,  and says she hates weaving in ends,  I’ve  made some interesting choices lately.  Maybe, after more than a decade of exposure… maybe Denny’s getting to me.