Techniques in Depth: Three-Needle Bind-Off

The weather is turning cold here, and it seems like it’s exactly the right time to start thinking about a big snuggly cardi. Maybe one of the sweaters in Field Guide No. 28: Renewal?

Designer Norah Gaughan made a smart decision in her patterns to help make the finishing the shoulders (often tricky!) easier.

Good shoulder finishing is important for two reasons:

The first is that section is pretty visible—well, unless you have loose, long hair! People can see this seam, so you want it to look good.

The other reason is that a solid shoulder seam is a key part of the “scaffolding” of the garment. It is crucial to helping the garment hold its shape over time, making sure it won’t stretch or sag off your shoulders.

We therefore need tidy and firm shoulder seams.

You can bind off and use a seaming method, but not everyone loves or feels confident about doing them.

Sometimes grafting is used, but I don’t recommend it for garments worn larger or looser (as in the case of Norah’s designs) as it isn’t very firm. Plus it can be hard to make tidy.

Norah uses a three-needle bind off: it’s quick, it’s easy, and it meets our shoulder needs handily. Here we go!

Set-up Step 1: When working the shoulders, cut the yarn when you’ve finished the knitting, but leave yourself decent tails—about 4 to 5 times the width of the stitches. That way, you’ll have enough to work the join.

I do this on both sides, as a security measure.

You will have two sets of stitches, one for each side of the garment. If they’re on holders, get them back onto needles. (If you’re using straight needles, set them up so that the working yarn is hanging at the tip of the needle.) Then do a quick count to confirm you’ve got the same number of stitches for both.

If not, un-knit a row on the side that’s short a stitch, and re-work with a sneaky increase as required to even things up.

Yes, always increase rather than decrease to match the stitch counts up, even if you end up with an extra stitch beyond what the pattern says! Having an extra stitch in a bound-off edge helps keeps things from getting too tight.

Set-up Step 2: Hold the work so that the right sides are together, and grab yourself a third needle. I recommend that your third needle be a size larger to keep your stitches loose. Although you want a firm join, it’s easy to make the bind-off inadvertently too tight.

A pointy tip is also a good thing for this method.

Step 1: With one of the long tails (really doesn’t matter which), knit into a stitch from both the front and back needles at the same time. This creates one new stitch on the right needle.

Step 2: Knit both of the next stitches, again one from the front needle and one from the back. There’s now two stitches on your right needle. Lift the first one over the second, as for a standard bind-off.

If you find it challenging to hold the two needles on the left-hand side, grab yourself a hair elastic and wrap it around the two needles to hold them together.

Repeat Step 2 until all stitches have been bound off and one stitch remains on the right-hand needle. Cut the yarn, leaving a tail about 4 inches/10 cm long, enough to weave in, and pull it up and out.

And done! Look at how nice it looks, on both the right side and the wrong side of the work.

If you work the three-needle bind-off with the right sides together/wrong sides facing, that puts this “chain” seam on the inside of the work, as shown.

I think that the chain is pretty darn handsome, and I will sometimes choose to place it on the outside of the work, by working the three-needle bind-off with the wrong sides together/right sides facing.

It looks good, and some find it more comfortable, as the smoother edge sits against their body. It’s up to you!

For further reading: there’s more on binding off loosely here.

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