Two Easy Bind Off Methods for Shawls

Hi, I'm Jen Lucas and in this video, let's talk about two easy bind-offs for your shawls. So when you're knitting a shawl from the top down or even sideways, you're going to have a lot of stitches on your needle at the end that you need to bind off. If you're making a small shawl, you might have maybe 250 or 300 stitches on the needle, but if you're knitting a larger say, two-skein, sock yarn shawl that's a crescent shape, you might have 400, maybe even 500 stitches or more on the needle, and now you have to bind them all off, and depending on your stitch pattern, you're going to want to make sure that you have a nice loose bind-off, because if your bind-off is too tight at the end of these shawls, your fabric is really going to curl up, and if you've used a stitch pattern like lace, you're going to want to be able to block out your shawl and really sort of accentuate the points of your lace, so if you have a tight bind-off, you're going to create a lot of problems for yourself. So I just want to show you two really easy bind-offs and you can just pick one of them and the next time you're working a top-down or even sideways shawl and you have all these stitches to bind off, you can just use one of these, and then you know that you have a nice loose bind-off for your shawl. So here I have three swatches and I've just done three different bind-offs. So this light blue one here, I just did sort of your standard bind-off, the one you learned when you first learn to knit, where you knit two stitches, pass one stitch over the other all the way across, and then here I have the knit two together through the back loop bind-off and so it does look a little bit different, but you can even see that the stitches, sort of these chains here that we're making, they're a little bit bigger than they are on the standard bind-off and that's because this one is a little bit looser and so I'm going to show you how to do this one, and this one's actually my favorite one to do because it's so fast and easy, but this one here, the elastic bind-off, it's also actually pretty fast and it's very easy, too, and this one, it sort of involves the same steps in that we're also going to do a knit two together through the back loop, but we're going to do one extra step for this one, and this one is really super-elastic, so if you really want to be aggressively blocking a shawl or even a lace sweater or something, this might be a good choice for you. So I just have a little swatch of fabric here where I'm going to bind off my stitches, so I'm just going to do a few stitches using that knit two together through the back loop bind-off, and then I'll do the rest of the stitches using the elastic bind-off so we can sort of see them really side-by-side. So to start for the knit two together bind-off, knit two together through the back loop bind-off, it's just as it sounds. We're going to knit two together through the back loop all the way across the row. So we're just gonna get our needles ready to bind off and knit two together through the back loop. So normally when you're going to knit two together, you would go into the front of the stitches this way, but we want to go through the back loops, so we're going to bring our right needle around to the back and go through the back loops of those two stitches. So I have my two stitches here on the needle, through the back loops, we're just going to knit those two together. Split the yarn a little bit, let's do that one again. Okay, we're going to knit two together, through the back loop, and so now we have one stitch on the right needle. Now all we have to do is slip that stitch back to the left needle and knit two together through the back loop again. So you're going to slip that stitch purlwise back to the left needle, and then just go in again through the back loops, knit two together through the back loops, and that's all there is to this bind-off is we're just going to take the stitch from the right needle to the left needle, slip it purlwise, and then knit two together through the back loops again. And that's it, and you just want to make sure you're, you'll notice as I'm working this, I am not tugging these stitches tight. You do not want to, I always say, sort of crank down on your stitches. You want to keep this nice and loose. So you just want to have just kind of a gentle hand as you're working these knit two together through the back loops. So let's just do a few more and it's really easy and you can see here that I just sort of get into this rhythm of I bring this stitch over and I just sort of bring the needle right in to the next stitch so you can really get into a rhythm with this one. It's why I like it so much. It's so fast because I don't know about you, but if I'm knitting a top-down shawl and I have 400 stitches at the end of that shawl, I want to bind off as fast as possible so that I can move on to the next shawl. So that's part of the reason that I really like this one is because it is so speedy. So let's just do a few more here and then we'll switch and do that elastic bind-off. Oops, going to just go back over here and knit two together through the back loop and knit two together through the back loop. So there we go. So we've bound off a few stitches using the knit two together through the back loop bind-off. So now let's take a look at the elastic bind-off. So for the elastic bind-off, basically, you're going to first knit a stitch, then knit two together through the back loop, and so you're going to just keep doing that all the way across. You're going to knit the stitch and now knit two together through the back loop. So you'll notice it is a little bit different than that first bind-off that we did, and you are adding a little more yarn because you're doing that knit one before the knit two together through the back loop. So we'll just keep working this and you can even already see here and I'll finish this off and so we can take a closer look, but it already does look a little bit different when we're comparing the two. So you just knit one, knit two together through the back loop. So you can see this one actually also could be pretty speedy, but you are going to have to make sure that you have enough yarn left in your project to do this because you are basically knitting a whole nother row and also binding off, so if you are in a situation where you're coming to the end of that shawl, and you don't have a lot of yarn left and you're sort of playing yarn chicken, you know, this elastic bind-off, you might be taking a risk of running out of yarn with this one 'cause it does take a little bit more yarn than other bind-offs, but it does make a very stretchy and elastic bind-off, it's in the name, right? So here we go. We're just gonna finish this off here, working this elastic bind-off, and so now we've come to the end and you would just, you know, snip the end and bring your yarn through, but let's just look at these bind-offs here. So you can actually pretty clearly see where I've switched here. So here I have my knit two together through the back loop and it's pretty stretchy here if I just kind of hold it, and then here I have my elastic bind-off and you can see it's actually sort of coming up or getting like a little bit of a stair-step and that's because I added an extra knit stitch here when I got to that elastic bind-off, but you can see, look how stretchy this one is, and this one is stretchy, but this one really gives you a lot of stretch and so if you're, like I said, wanting to work a shawl that has really beautiful points in the lace that you really want to block out at the end, you're really going to want to choose one of these bind-offs and maybe even for something like that really go with the elastic bind-offs, and as you know, there's so many different ways that you can bind off your knitting, but these are my two favorite ways to finish off a shawl.