Knitting

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Why Destashing Is Stressful!

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I’ve figured out why I don’t like to de-stash. For one thing, it involves using yarns that have outlived their “O.M.G I Need To Knit With This Right Now”-full ness.

But, I think mainly, it’s like using up an emergency cache of batteries, or the last Q-tip, your last dollar in your checking accout, or even the last piece of chocolate. What if you need it later. What if you find the perfect pattern and you know you have the perfect yarn and just can’t find it, because you’ve already used it, but it was already eliminated from your memory banks because it was stashed? What if??

“As if” is more like it. I can remember stuff that isn’t life threatening. It’s stuff that I need to use everyday (like the fact that I rode my motorcycle to the grocery store, and am wandering around in the parking lot with a cart full of groceries looking for my truck, ask me about “creative bungie-ing”) that I can’t seem to keep track of. I remember full well that I have 397 different colors of green in my stash (I went through a really weird “green” phase), but I can’t remember that the really cool new knitting clutch that I want to try out is green. “Where are my keys”? That one’s not even in the ballpark.

So, back to stashing. Stashing is kind of like a life force all it’s own. You save it up for a rainy day, and then when the rainy day hits, you’re all good. De-stashing is like spending. I suppose some might find it gratifying to finally find a use for all of those greens, I stress over it. Yeah, it saves me money, but what if, in the end, I end up spending more because I’ve already used the stuff I spent money on the first place to save money?

It’s very stressful!

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Make Your Knitting Machine Scarves Better

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!