Crafters Yarn Bomb a Plane in the Yukon

In one of the biggest yarn bombings I’ve ever seen that covered a single thing, knitters and crocheters from around the world have taken part in a project to cover a DC-3 with yarn in the Yukon Territory.

The project was conceived by Yarn Bomb Yukon, and you can see lots of great details and more information at their website. The project was more than six months in the making and involved squares (and full-sized blankets) from people all over North America. In all the 70-year-old plane was covered in nearly 2,500 square feet of stitching (though it looks like a lot of it was crocheted, I’m sure there’s some knitting in there, too).

The plane can be viewed in all its yarny splendor between now and Aug. 21. The pieces, which took two weeks to assemble (you can see a quick time-lapse of the process here) will be taken apart in blanket sizes and given to charity. (Ignore the fact that the story linked there starts with a joke about angry sheep and goes on to say the yarn used was all acrylic. Some people clearly have no clue what they’re talking about.)

[Photo by Yarn Bomb Yukon.]

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I feel like it’s been a while since I’ve shared any patterns for our circular knitting machine users. I know these devices aren’t for everyone but even though I much prefer knitting by hand, it is kind of fun to crank things out on these machines.

One of the most common early projects for a circular knitting machine is a scarf. Which makes sense, because it’s just one long tube and you can make it as long as you like.

One problem that comes from knitting scarves on the circular knitting machine, though, is that it can be hard to know how to finish the ends of the tube so that it looks like a finished scarf and not a tube of knitting.

If you’re not a knitter or crocheter, the most basic way to finish a circular knitting machine scarf is just by cinching up the ends and maybe adding a pompom to each end to cover up any hole that might still be visible at the end.

But if you have a little knitting or crochet skill or are willing to learn, there are a lot of different options for closing up the ends of a scarf. And this would also be true if you hand knit a tube scarf!

I recently wrote a post over at Our Daily Craft that includes five different ways to close up the ends of a tube scarf:

the simple cinching method mentioned above
sewing the stitches together
three needle bind off
grafting
crochet bind off

Grafting is my favorite because I feel like it gives the cleanest, closest to a seamless look. If you’re a knitter you may already know how to do it but even if you don’t it’s not that hard to learn.

Do you knit tube scarves by hand or machine? I’d love to know how you like to finish them!

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