Marie Connelly, owner ofStitch DC gave a little preview of fall yarns at Design Within Reach in Bethesda, MD this weekend. One of the knitters there, Eva, was anti-purl. She knits everything, in both directions. She was a fascinating woman, who rides sled-dogs in search and rescue operations. She had just visited Alaska to do some sled riding, and she also got to visit a Quiviut “farm.” Quiviut are Arctic “musk ox,” they are wild and produce an extremely soft fiber–I’ll be talking about them again soon…

One of Eva’s other knitting pet peeves is binding off. She prefers to knit two stitches together, then pass the new stitch back to the left needle and repeat. I had seen this bind off before, but it didn’t strike me as having any particular advantage (it’s not extra-stretchy, or extra-firm, for example).

Coincidentally, last night Annie Modesitt was on the Knitty Gritty. She demonstrated the same bind-off, and I got to see how fast it is to do… It creates an edge that looks like a crocheted slip stitch. (And in fact, it would probably be a good bind off to use if you intended to crochet an edging.) Another advantage: it’s very easy to take out. You can just pull it out like you would crochet, and there you have live stitches again. Annie mentioned that because of this, she sometimes uses this bind off instead of a stitch holder, she’ll just do the knit2tog bind off, and then rip it out when she’s ready to pick up those stitches again. Pretty cool!

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Knit2Tog Bind Off