Finally, an extra-loose bindoff!
January 9th, 2007 at 9:37 pm (Knitting)
Today I learned how to do an extra-loose bindoff for a scarf I’m knitting. I’d rate myself as an “intermediate” knitter — willing to try new techniques, patterns, and stitches, but still needing some good instructions (or a knowledgable friend) to venture into the unknown.
The scarf I’m knitting is a Moebius Scarf. That is, like a Moebius strip, it has only one side (achieved with an ingenious twist in the circular needle setup — kudos to Cat Bordhi and her book, “Magical Knitting”!). Interestingly, for the purposes of knitting (but also obviously, if you were to think it through), a Moebius strip also has only one edge. So you knit around and around and that makes the scarf grow outwards, on both sides, from the center. It’s great fun, in terms of knitting and topology.
At any rate, once this scarf comes off the needles, you want it to have a lot of flex, so that it can drape fetchingly around your neck, rather than bunching up along the edges due to a too-tight bindoff. Binding off too tightly is a common affliction, so that many knitting books recommend using a larger needle once you get to this final step; but who really has a second set of somewhat-larger needles ready for every project they attempt?
Magical Knitting recommends the following solution:
Knit 2, * insert left needle through the front of 2 stitches on the right needle, knit 1 (dropping both stitches off), knit 1. Repeat from *.
Lovely!