This Handy Flow Chart Helps You Decide Who to Knit Sweaters For

The pinnacle of knit gift-giving is a knit sweater (though socks are pretty high up there, too, because they take a long time and most people are skeptical about knit socks, so you really have to be careful who you give them to).

Clearly not everyone deserves a knit sweater for the holidays or any other time. So how do you decide who gets a garment and who gets, say, a scarf or a hat instead?

If you have to wonder, that’s probably not a person who deserves a knit sweater.

But if you’d like a more scientific approach to the problem, check out this flow chart from Interweave that will help you decide who to knit a sweater for.

There is more to the chart than is pictured above, so click over to make your decision making easier.

Have you ever knit a sweater for someone? How did you decide they were worthy? (I pretty much only knit sweaters for myself and my daughter, who is definitely worthy.)

[Photo: Interweave.]

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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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