Lessons
Lesson Info
3-Needle Bind Off
For those of you at home what you will need are two swatches or two pieces that mock like a front and back of a sweater. We're gonna be doing what's called a three needle bind off. This is a method for seaming your project, to live pieces, it's an option to kitchener stitch but it will not give you that seamless meld. It actually does create a seam but it's a great way to seam. Especially something like shoulders where you want it to be really, super reinforced because there's gonna be some pulling on especially if you were working like with a kid's sweater or something. So this is a great way to bind off and seam together at the same time. So what we do, is you have on parallel needles. You have your front piece, the right side out, back piece right side out, so you have your wrong sides facing. You're gonna insert your needle. Through the first stitch on both the front and the back needle. So you actually need three needles of the same size for this particular one. Seam method. You'r...
e gonna yarn over and you're gonna knit those two stitches together. The front and the back stitches. That's your first bind off. So you go to the next stitch. You're gonna insert through the front, back needle. Yarn over. Knit them together. And that is all there is to it. This one's kinda quick and dirty but it's a really great method and I'm gonna just go ahead and do it quickly so I can have enough done that you can see what it looks like. So you're just treating the stitches on the front and the back as if they were one. And you're holding the needles parallel in your left hand. Letting both those stitches fall off. This is another one where you would need to have an even amount of stitches on both the front and back needles for it to work. I just realized that what I've been doing is knitting and not actually binding off at all. I'm gonna back up. I got into a zone again. Did any of you see the article on the New York Times' blog the other day about knitting being meditative. And there's been a whole slew of articles about all of the benefits of knitting for keeping your mind young, for helping to prevent things like Alzheimer's, stress relief or whatever and one of the reasons that it is is for the reason that just happened to me right now is that I get into this knitting zone and you kinda check out a little bit. And that's really healthy for you. It puts you into a kind of a mellow state. So I'm reloading my needle right now, you don't need to worry about this, you keep working. I have a question about reloading a needle and I'm watching which direction you're putting those stitches on. Yeah. I guess I don't have a question after all. Okay, good talk. You're entering them from the right not the back, or the front not the back. Yeah and you know what? Honestly, you can tell when you look if they're twisted when you put them on you can just fix that. To fix a stitch if it's loaded on the wrong way you can slide it off, put it back on or you can just work it through the back loop and get it to the right place. Okay, for real, we're gonna do the three needle bind off. We're gonna go insert through the front and the back. We're gonna knit those two together. Then we're gonna repeat that process again. Knitting through the front and the back stitch. Knitting them together and now the crucial part, we're going to bind off. So we're gonna slip the stitch. The first stich over the second stitch and let it fall off. Alright, now we're gonna go to the next one. We're gonna come in through the stitch on the front needle and then the back needle. Knit them together. Bind off. And you just continue doing that all the way across the piece. And you can see here this creates an exposed seam. If you didn't want it to be exposed then you could do it on the opposite side. I really like exposed seams. I like the look of that. But it's totally a design feature. If you wanted it to be hidden, if I flip that over, you would seam it together with both right sides together instead of wrong. So just play with it.
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Ratings and Reviews
Toni Imwold
Thanks Vicki for teaching a great class. I consider myself to be an advanced knitter but I still learned some great tips and ideas from you. The cowl patterns look great and I plan to knit one soon.
a Creativelive Student
This was an outstanding, intensive workshop by Vickie Howell. She covered a wide variety of techniques and I am amazed at how much I learned in just a few hours. I started practicing some of the new skills I learned and am happy to report that they are indeed now part of my knitting knowledge.
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