The Basic Bind Off

Hi everyone. I'm Jen Lucas for The Knitting Circle. In this video, I'm going to show you how to work a standard bind off. Once you've learned to cast-on, knit, and purl, you need to know how to bind off so that you can end your piece and be ready to start your next knitting project. There are lots of ways to bind off, but in this video I'm going to show you the standard knitwise bind off, which is the most common bind off that you'll find in knitting.

So let's go ahead and take a look. Now it's time to bind off our piece. You've done all your knitting, you gotta figure out how to get it off the needles. And so we're going to do a standard bind off. There are so many different ways to bind off, but this is going to be the most common one that you'll see.

So I just have my little swatch here. This is what we'll be creating up here, is this is the bind off here. So the first thing we're going to do is we are going to knit a stitch. We're going to knit a second stitch. So now we have two stitches on our right-hand needle.

We're going to use our left-hand needle and we're going to take the first stitch and pass it over the second stitch, so that we're left with one stitch on our right-hand needle. And so we have bound off one stitch, you can see it right there. So now I have one stitch on the needle. We're going to knit another stitch, so I have two stitches on the right hand needle, and then again, I'm going to pass the first stitch by inserting my needle in this way. I'm going to bring it to the end and pass it over, like that.

You just keep working in this manner. Knit so you have two stitches on the right hand needle, pass the first stitch over the second stitch. We're going to just continue that all the way down. You don't want to do this too tight. When I'm binding off, you might feel like you want to really sorta crank down or pull on this yarn.

You don't want to do that, you just want to try to keep it nice and loose. I'm gonna knit another stitch, pass it over. You just have a few more to go. You might sometimes see this called a knitwise bind off because we're knitting the stitches and then binding them off. But again, it is the most common bind off that you will use.

You might also sometimes see it called casting off or a cast off. And there we go. We've come to the last one, and what I'm left with is one stitch left on the needle. And so now to finish it off, we're just going to take our scissors, we're gonna snip the yarn. I usually leave six to eight inches because we're going to need to weave in that end.

So we're going to just give this a little pull. You don't want to pull it too much. You don't want to pull the loop all the way out, but I just give it a little pull to open that up. I'm going to take my tail and I'm going to pass it through the loop there. So it's coming through the loop and then we're just going to pull it.

And there we go, we've bound off all our stitches. Now we would use a tapestry needle to weave in our ends and we'd be all done. And that is the standard knitwise bind off. And we're done. Here at The Knitting Circle, we've now shown you how to cast-on, knit, purl, and bind off.

We also have lots of other great knitting content to help you on your knitting journey, so I hope that you'll stick around and check it out. I'm Jen Lucas, and I hope that you enjoyed this video and I'll see you back here at The Knitting Circle again, real soon.