Tomorrow marks the official end of our Odora Knitalong. How’s your Odora coming along? Once you finish the knitting, the last thing to do is to work a bind off—and as with all projects, you want to choose the bind off that best suits the pattern. All too often, the bind-off edge can be too tight, making the fabric pull in on itself, which you absolutely don’t want with a big shawl such as Odora.
Our Odora Shawl pattern calls for a sewn bind-off method. If you’re a visual learner, here’s a video that Emily made demonstrating how to work this stretchy bind-off.
Here’s how to do it:
- Cut your yarn so that you have a really long tail—this tail is going to be used to bind off the entire shawl, so err on the side of having way too much yarn at the end of the bind off.
- Thread the tail on a blunt-tip sewing needle. A blunt-tip needle will help to ensure that you don’t split the yarn while working through the stitches.
- Insert the needle through the first two stitches purlwise—from right to left. Pull the yarn all the way through, but don’t pull too tightly once you reach the end.
- Insert the needle through the last stitch worked (the one farthest to the right, at the very end of the needle) knitwise. Drop off this stitch from the needle.
- Repeat steps 2–4 until you’re about out of stitches—when you only have one stitch left, insert the blunt-tip needle through purlwise (right to left) once more, then drop the remaining stitch off the knitting needle.
This bind off may seem a little more tedious than a traditional bind off of passing stitches over one another, but it’s one of the ways to make sure your bind-off edge remains stretchy. There are many different ways to work a stretchy bind off, however, and you can use any that appeals to you! Do you have a favorite stretchy bind-off method? Let us know in the comments!
-AP
I like to use Jeny’s Surprisingly Stretchy Bind-off. I’ve tried the sewn bind-off before and had difficulty making it look even and also be stretchy enough for my purposes without being too loose and floppy.
I figure my problems with the sewn bind-off is that I’m too impatient to practice it long enough to have it come out correctly. The JSSBO works well for me in part because it is based on what I was already doing.