Hi! My name is Toni Lipe with Toni's Design Studio. Today, we are talking about how to knit. Right now, we are going to talk about binding off your stitches. Once you have completed your knitting project, you need to get the stitches off of the needle. You have to keep them together so that the whole knitting project does not unravel. So this is called binding off. There is many bind off methods. We are going to use a basic bind off method today.
What you will do, you have your swatch or your project on your left-hand needle. Your right hand needle is empty. To bind off, what we need to do is to knit the first stitch so we slide our needle under the loop, wrap the yarn around, and pull the yarn through the loop and pull the loop off. And we do that one more time to the second stitch.
Now we have two stitches on our right-hand needle. What we need to do now to secure these stitches so that they don't unravel is to take the point of your left-hand needle and slide it under the first stitch on your right-hand needle, and holding the yarn in your index finger so it doesn't slide off too much. You need to pull that first stitch over the second stitch so that you only have one stitch on the right-hand needle and we continue to do that one more time. We have a stitch on the right-hand needle, we will knit the next stitch and once again, we have two stitches on the right-hand needle. We need to slide the left-hand needle under that first stitch and pull it up and over the second stitch and off the needle.
Continue doing this across the row, knit the knit stitch. Two stitches on the needle. Slide the left needle under the first stitch, the one closest to your hand, slide it up over the second stitch and off the right needle. This will create an attractive bind off edge. It ends up looking like a chain stitch basically. You have to be very careful about not binding off too tightly. As we are casting on, you don't want this bound off edge to be so tight that it skews the knitting project and makes it look odd.
Some people like to use a larger needle to bind off. If they can't, bind off loosely enough. Others just loosen their tension a little bit and just continue to bind off. Knit a stitch, wrap it around, pull that stitch over, and I will show you that edge in just a minute.
So you will always have only two or one stitches on your right-hand needle. If you have more than that, you have knitted too many stitches without binding off. Now as you go across loosely, you will see that the bind off edge is very neat, very elastic, which is important. I am going to complete this to show you what to do with the last stitch. Knitting a stitch, pulling it over. Knitting, pulling it over, and off.
So we are finishing our knitting project and ready to move on to the next one just about. There are decorative ways to bind off that we will have to talk about another time. And not, here we have got two more stitches left and we are going to pull it over and we have one stitch. We need to secure that so the whole knitting project doesn't unravel so we cut off our yarn with our scissors and this loop, we will pull this thread through and then snug it up tight, and we have completed our project or our swatch. And that is the bind off and as you can see, it is a very attractive chain stitch edge and we have completed our first swatch on how to knit.