I must have known about this little trick, because I used it on sweaters I made before I found it in Cat Bordhi’s New Pathways for Sock Knitters: Book One. It’s an incredibly easy way to handle the knitsch that happens when we bind off any project worked in the round.

I happen to prefer working seamlessly if at all possible, because I simply don’t like sewing hand-knits. But that doesn’t mean working seamlessly is without issues. It’s just that it has a different set of issues than working in pieces to be seamed, so we each need to decide which set of issues we want to deal with. This little trick fixes one of the ITR issues.

The Problem

When you are binding off any item made in the round, there is a little—or not so little—hiccup that happens when you bind off the last stitch. There’s a gap between the beginning of the BO and its end. This cotton-linen yarn will eventually (after a couple of laundering cycles) settle in at 6.25 spi, so it doesn’t look too bad.

In larger yarns, it looks proportionally worse if not attended to.

The Solution

We’re going to run the BO tail through the first stitch, then back down through the last stitch. That joins the beginning of the round to the end, smoothing over the knitsch and making for a practically invisible result.

I used to struggle with determining exactly which stitch was the first one. So now, after I make the first stitch in the BO round, I put a pin either right in the stitch or, even better, around the stitch.

Then I complete the BO round in the usual way, cutting the working yarn and pulling the tail through the final stitch. I thread the tail in a blunt tapestry needle and, using the oh-so-helpful openable marker, pull a bit on the first stitch so I can see where to put the tapestry needle, and run the needle under both legs of the first stitch.

(Note that you need to put the tapestry needle in the public side of the WIP and pull it out on the private side.)

I then put the tapestry needle down through the last stitch of the BO round, the same stitch where the tail was pulled through after cutting the working yarn.

Depending on how much I’ve had to fiddle to see where to put the needle through, I adjust the tension of the final BO stitch as well as the new “stitch” I just created until the stitch sizes all match across the gap.

Now you too can have neater bound-off edges on your in-the-round projects.