Doctor Who Scarf: Really, it's done...

...and has been for quite a while if I want to be honest about it. Or rather, the knitting is. I reached the goal of 12', as predicted, sometime last Sunday, but between rainy days, lost camera, and the practical difficulty of laying out such a thing to photograph in my apartment and fitting it in one frame, it's been a long time getting it photographed in this state. I added a little more on, as well, but now I'm confronted with many a knitter's worst nightmare: weaving in approximately a billion ends. Give or take a few million.

For the uninitiated, weaving in ends is the process of taking the yarn ends hanging off of a project and looping them back through the stitches, which both makes the work look cleaner and, depending on how the thing's constructed, further ensures it will not unravel. They usually turn up every time you start or stop a new yarn. When working in the same color, there are ways to avoid it, but with stripes, there's no hope, so I have two ends to weave in for each stripe on the scarf. At this magnitude, a billion is only a slight exaggeration.

This is one of the greatest difficulties of "finishing" a project; it's why if you look at projects on Ravelry (a knit/crochet project sharing site), you will find any number of in progress pieces that hang at 95%, or even 100% nearly indefinitely, without their creator declaring them complete. It's weaving in the damn ends.

When it's for me, I don't mind having strings hanging off unless they put the piece at risk for unraveling, so it's become sort of a trademark of knitted things I make for myself. Plus, in a way, it complements the trend of wearing things, especially baseball hats, with the tags hanging off of them. It shows people where it came from. They both also have the feature in common of making you look a little silly. Looking silly, as evidenced by the themes of the last post, is clearly among my major concerns: I am concerned about not looking silly enough.

So I've done what a great history of fiber artists have done and started another project rather than do the finish work on the first one. I won't tell you what the other project is, because I want it to be a surprise for Mlle. Commissioner, but it involves a large quantity of bobbles and has had other parts reknit several times because the shaping wasn't quite right.

Slowly, I am working through the woven in stripe ends. On the other end of that, I get to make tassels, which I'm rather looking forward to doing. It appears that my estimation of two weeks will be about spot on for this project, even if that's a self-fulfilling time frame. Evidence of the school year creeps up more and more, starting to reclaim my brain from the free-roaming pastures of summer. It can't shut me in the barn yet, though. I will stampede the grass of summer yet!