Video: The Three-Needle Cast Off
Lucy Hague's stunning Pleione blanket uses a three-needle cast off (or grafting) to join the hexagon motifs. Image © Jesse Wild.
So I'm determined to get back into the swing of regular blogging, and the launch of our new book, Something New to Learn About Cables is a good kick in the right direction. We have ten new tutorial videos to share with you, and I'm going to attempt to put up two per week over the next five weeks. Cheer me on please someone! It's been busy here and much as I love writing the blog, it does rather fall by the wayside when there are book deadlines and photo shoots to organise.
The three-needle cast off (or bind off for US readers) is a brilliantly simple but neat technique. My favourite sort! You take two sets of live stitches and you join them. There's no messing around with sewing, and as long as you start with the same number of stitches in each of your sets, the knitted fabric will be perfectly lined up with no bunching or uneven-ness that seems to be a by-product of my late-night lack of sewing skills!
I first used a three-needle cast off on the shoulders of a little striped jumper I made for my nephew when I had only been knitting a few months (if you want a giggle you can look back at the Ravelry profile I had as a brand new knitter – when I joined The Knitter I started a new professional profile, which is the one I still use today). I then picked up stitches around the armholes and knitted the sleeves down to the cuffs. This was a total revelation for me, and it gave such a step up in the neatness of my work that I bored Jim senseless with it for days.
So without further chatter from me, here is our tutorial video on the three-needle cast off.
This tutorial takes you through how to work a 3-needle bind off, also referred to as a 3-needle cast off. This technique is useful for all sorts of situations. It's a neat way of joining two sets of live stitches, for example, when joining blanket blocks, or the shoulders of a sweater.
You can join our cables knitalong in our Ravelry group! It kicks off on Sunday 1st April and there will be lots of supportive knitters hanging out working on cabled projects, as well as a few prizes. You can find all of the information in the knitalong thread here: SN2LAC Knitalong
Happy cabling!