Weaving in ends

★☆☆ - Beginner

Sooner or later, if you're working with lots of colours in crochet and let's face it, that is one of the joys of crochet, then you're going to end up with a picture like you see above.

Lots of ends to do hide away.  So how do you deal with them?  Well, there's a number of ways...

First of all you'll need a yarn needle.  A yarn needle is like a regular sewing needle but bigger and fatter. You can get metal and plastic versions but I prefer the metal ones, I seem to snap the plastic kind.
They are also available with rounded or pointy ends ends.

Which you use is partly down to preference and partly down to the type of yarn you're using and what project you're making

Round Needles
Great for most things.  I much prefer them for gliding through 100% (non-mercerised) cotton or any of the more matt cottons or grabby natural fibers.  Work is much easier to undo if the threads are worked in with a round ended needle, so great for clothes, where you might want to make an adjustment later.

Sharp Needles
Good for weaving the yarn ends in and out of the individual fibers of the yarn which is useful when working with thin or slippery yarns, so laceweight yarns, shiny and silky yarns and for times where there isn't a lot of room to hide the end, for example in mesh work.


Basically we need to hide the ends into the back of the work so that they can't be seen from the front. Here are the ones I like to use the most:

Great for more open work crochet, like the classic granny square, where there are gaps along the row where the ends can't be hidden.

Thread the yarn onto the needle and use the needle to work through the back loops of the stitches.
Work first in one direction, then another.

Threading the yarn under stitches but keeping the woven in end within the same colour row to help keep it nicely hidden.
You want to keep going until you've worked about 3 or 4 inches* of the end in, using all different directions.

* For some projects a longer length would be better, 6 to 8 inches maybe for a project that might be treated robustly - a childrens blanket for example!
Once you've woven in as much as you'd like, snip the yarn close to the work, taking care not to snip any of your precious crochet.

Great for straight rows of crochet, where you have a nice long line of stitches to hide the ends under.

Thread the yarn onto a needle and slide the needle under the backs of the stitches, following the line of the row/round that you've just worked.
Once about half of the yarn end is under the stitches, thread through the back loops of a stitch.

Then slide the needle under the stitches of the row below, in the opposite direction this time, back towards your starting point.
Then carefully snip the yarn.
TIP:  When you are working in the end from the last row, you can slide the needle under the bumps at the back of the stitches as shown in the picture and hide the end that way.

Next Steps:

✽  Find out how to crochet over the ends, it's great for saving a little time later