To Knot or Not to Knot

Knots. We all use them.  Many have specific uses.  Let's start with knots that are officially allowed in knitting and crocheting.  A slip knot.   The fasten off.   Those are it. 

We all use the slip knot to start knitting and crocheting, mostly. It's a very useful thing.  I have also tried it when doing color work to add in the new color so the loose end doesn't pull through and cause a dropped stitch.   This wouldn't happen if I made sure to leave a tail 6-8 inches long for weaving in.   I'm human and sometimes don't do everything the way I should.  But really, did you ever consider 2 inches to be that important?  I use this for more than crochet and knit.   I have used it to hang my solar clothes dryer (read washline).  I have used it to tie my fruit trees and vining plants to stakes and

cages. 

The fasten off is the ending of knitting and crocheting.   The last loop has a 6 - 8 inch tail pulled thru.  Is it a knot or not?  I'm not sure either way.

Ends,  whether it's a color change or adding a new ball of yarn, are to be woven in.  No exceptions. I understand some of the reasoning.  No one wants the princess and the pea syndrome going on in their clothes.  But more importantly, if you use a slippery yarn, think the abundance of acrylic soft yarns on the market,  silk yarn,  llama and alpaca yarns, you definitely need to be careful about not knotting and cutting. I've seen firsthand how those yarns loosen up through use and washing and then come apart.  For this situation I bend the rules a bit.I use a square knot and then weave in the ends after splitting the plies.

Now when I was learning,  I didn't know about the rules.  Very little was written in the old instruction book I was working from about finishing techniques.  Did I use knots? You bet.  I used a lot of granny knots (square knots done wrong).  I fastened off with not just a single pull through of the end but 5 or 6.  Since I didn't get to wear anything I made, it didn't matter. Barbie and company didn't care about comfort.  At least they didn't say anything.

When I finally learned about weaving in the ends, I was terrible at it.  Very thick seams at the ends because it was easy to run the end in thru there going only one direction.  Needless to say I had a lot of ends popping through.  I had bunches of unattractive seams that were uncomfortable.

Slowly over the years, I found more books I could read about technique and try to revise my ways of doing things that I found unsatisfactory.  Elizabeth Zimmerman both did and did not say a lot about finishing in very few words.  Her admonition was to have the inside of a garment as neat and tidy and beautiful as the outside.  I don't remember seeing any diagrams, drawings or photos of what to do.