Weaving In Ends
Mary Beth TempleDescription
Once a project is complete and the yarn tail has been fastened off, it’s time to weave in the ends. In this video, crochet expert Mary Beth Temple demonstrates how to weave in the ends on a crochet project.
Mary Beth begins by noting that it is particularly important to learn how to properly weave in your ends. If not done neatly, the ends can start to come out or you can be left with an unattractive “lump” on the project.
Using a blunt, large-eye tapestry or yarn needle, Mary Beth threads the yarn tail onto the needle. The yarn tail is at least four to six inches in length. The yarn tail must be long enough to comfortably weave in the ends of the project. Once the yarn tail is threaded, Mary Beth begins to weave in the end by bringing the needle through the stitches and tugging slightly. She notes that it’s important not to tug too tightly while weaving in ends, or the stitches will begin to pull out of shape.
Once the end is securely woven into the project, the yarn can be trimmed close to the fabric. Mary Beth notes that typically the ends are woven in on the wrong side of the crocheted piece, so that they are invisible from the right side (or public side) of the project. She ends the video by mentioning that weaving in ends is “more of an art than a science.” It’s important to just take your time, follow your stitches, and not pull too tightly.
Hi guys, Mary Beth Temple here, and in this video, I want to talk about weaving in ends. Because here's the thing, you've finished your project, you've ended it off, and you have left yourself a nice long tail. You have to hide that tail and you want to weave it in in a specific way so that it doesn't pull out, causing your work to either become unraveled or leaving you a little ugly bit where the tail's hanging out. So let's take a closer look at weaving in ends. In my opinion, the best way to weave in an end is to use a tapestry needle or yarn needle. Now, what makes this needle different from other types of needles is two things. One, it has a pretty big eye. The eye is the opening in the needle and we need it to be pretty big to get that yarn in there. And the other is it has a blunt tip. You do not want a pointy, sharp tip like you would if you were sewing fabric because you don't necessarily want the point of the needle to split the ply, to go into the body of the yarn. You want to sort of have it float in between. Now, this is a bent needle because that's what I like. You don't have to have a bent needle, you can do whatever you prefer. So you've cut your tail, you've left yourself a nice, long tail to weave in because it's always better to have too much yarn to weave in than not enough, because the short tail pulls out. So I'm just going to go ahead and thread that and you may have noticed I did it out of habit, but let's talk about it. This is a bulky yarn and a pretty big needle because I use bigger tools on camera so you can see what I'm doing, but you may notice that what I did is I took my thumbnail and I sort of squished it flat, and I did that so that it'll pop right in there. Now, of course, it doesn't want to because here we are on camera, but yes, it just went right in. You can always use a needle threader if you have one laying around. So this is just a swatch of crocheted fabric. You want to keep your end being woven into the wrong side of the work, so let's just pretend it's this side for the sake of argument. What I like to do is hide the yarn inside the stitch. So I'm sort of following around where the stitch is, and you can see, remember I was talking about that blunt tip? I'm not trying to split the yarn because when you pull that yarn through, it gets super irritating and lumpy and you don't want to do that. So you want to sort of trace some other threads that were in the stitch. These are double crochets, just for the record. And so I want to give that a tug, but I don't want to pull it too tight because watch, if I pull it too tight, I'm going to lose the height of the stitch, so I don't want to do that. And then I might swing over here. I'm going to go up and down a couple of times. Now, can you crochet over ends when you're crocheting? Yes, and I often do. However, sometimes it's simply not enough, so sometimes you can crochet over your ends and then you still might want to go back in with your needle and move that end up and down a couple of times. And this is enough, you don't have to do this for 87 inches, you know what I mean? You just have to make sure that it's not going to pull out easily. So there it is on my double crochets and you can't see it on the other side. Now, can you see it a little bit on the top? Yes, and if I was not going to put an edging, maybe I wouldn't have come all the way up to the top of the stitch. If I am going to put an edging or that's going to be in a seam, then who cares? Nobody's going to see it, I can cover that up. Again, let's just talk ever so briefly about crocheting over. So if I was to crochet over an end, say I was changing color and I was crocheting over an end, it would be here, right? It would be under those stitches and it would be parallel to the row. You can see it a little bit, it's not terrible. For the double crochet, I would definitely do it the way I showed you first. Say I was doing single crochet, which doesn't have a lot of height, and I did need to go under the row. What I might do is go under the row for a little bit and then go down to the next row and come back so that there is a curve in the yarn. What you do not want is just a straight piece of yarn that can get snagged on something and pull right out and unravel, but it's definitely more of an art than a science. Remember that weaving in ends is more of an art than a science, but if you take the tips that I just gave you, you'll be able to do it nicely and hide those tails in your work. I'm Mary Beth Temple, looking forward to seeing you again here real soon, bye-bye.
I usually wrap the yarn around the eye of the needle once, then slip it off the eye and push the wrapped end of the yarn through the eye. While this method doubles the size of the yarn going through the eye, it can be very useful with a smaller eyed needle. I like this method for fine thread also.