Loose Ends

Today’s story is a lovely, gentle piece of narrative journalism, dropping in on the volunteers who use knitting, crochet, and other crafts to help strangers whose loved ones have passed away. It comes from Mildew, the secondhand fashion magazine that’s based in Mexico City, telling new stories about old clothes all around the world.

When Dawn Tucker, an avid thrifter and textile crafter, visits her local secondhand shops in Flagstaff, Arizona, she looks for unfinished knitting projects. “I always wonder about them,” she says. “Did they give it up, or did they pass away? What happened that brought it to Savers?”

So when she heard a local radio segment about Loose Ends, an organization that matches unfinished crafting projects with “finishers” who complete them for their intended recipients, she immediately signed up.

Across Flagstaff, Rebekah Nordstrom heard the same segment on KNAU, the city’s public radio station. She was moved by the idea, and thought about an unfinished pair of mittens that a friend had given her to finish before the friend passed away. “It was Scandinavian knitting, which is notoriously challenging, and I just couldn’t finish it,” says Rebekah. When Loose Ends matched her with Dawn, who lives nearby, it felt like fate.

That’s exactly the type of connection that Jennifer Simonic and Masey Kaplan wanted to foster when they started Loose Ends in 2022. The longtime friends and devoted crafters had both finished projects from friends’ loved ones before. When a mutual friend asked if either of them would crochet two blankets that her mom had started, they thought they’d see if a skilled crocheter could take them on. They put up flyers in their neighborhood craft stores, cafes, and senior centers in Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Maine, and posted in groups online. A month later, they had a list of 150 finishers across the country.

“I wasn’t surprised, because crafters love what they do,” says Jennifer. “We know what it’s like to lose somebody, and if something happened to us, we’d want our projects to be finished as well.”