Day 14: Cowl Part 5 – Bind Off & Finishing

Hi there. I'm Jen Lucas from The Knitting Circle. Welcome to day 14 in our 14 day Learn to Knit series. In this video, we're gonna bind off our cowl and do a little bit of finishing and our first project will be complete. Let's get started.

Okay, we've completed the knitting on our cowl. We've finished our garter stitch and eyelet section and then we knit those last two rows to finish off that section so it's nice and even on both sides. Now we're ready to bind off. So this is my bind off edge here on my finished cowl. And once the bind off is done, we can trim our yarn, cut the, cut our project off the ball of yarn.

We're gonna weave in the ends, add the button. I can talk a little bit about caring for your cowl as well. So here I have my swatch, you'll obviously have your entire cowl that has your 27 stitches on the needle. And we're going to bind this stitches off and we're just going to use a regular bind off the one that we've learned in this series, and then we'll be ready to work our next step. So, to work a standard knitwise bind off which is what we're doing here.

We're going to knit one stitch, knit a second stich, pass the first stitch over and off. So we've passed the first stitch over the second stitch and so we're left with one stitch on the needle. Gonna knit one, pass the first stitch, so the right most stitch, over the second stitch and off. And you can see right here, we're starting to bind off our stitches. And we're just repeating that process until all your stitches are bound off.

So it's at this point, just knit one, then pass the second over the first. Knit one, pass the second over the first, and so on. You're gonna just do this all the way to the end. You wanna just make sure that you're not pulling too tight so that you're not starting to sort of pucker your, your edge here. Sometimes knitters will like to use a larger needle for their bind off, if you do find that it's too tight.

We're just gonna keep binding off all the way across. And I'd like to share with you one little thing that I personally like to do when I'm binding off. And so sometimes when you bind off your last stitch can be a little loose and it, it doesn't, you can sort of weave in your end to make it look better, but something easier that you can do is when you have two stitches left here on the needle, just knit those two together, like that, and then bind off like this. And that's not something everybody does. That's just something that I like to do in order to have a neater edge here.

So here's our bind off here, and you can see it kinda makes this nice almost little braid. And it looks if we're looking at our cast on edge it does look, our cast on edge doesn't look quite like a braid, but up against the garter stitch it does kind of match nicely. So there we go, so we're left with one stitch. So now what do we do? We're just gonna kinda pull this a little bit just so, it's a little bit loose and then I'm gonna grab my scissors and we're going to trim the yarn leaving about a six to eight inch tail.

I don't personally measure it with a ruler or tape measure or anything I just eyeball. So we can just move our yarn aside. So we're left with this final stitch and I like to just pull it actually all the way through like this, just like that, and so we have our bind off. So now our cowl and I have my little swatch here, you'll have your whole entire cowl, is done. So now we just need to do a little bit of finishing here.

So the first thing is going to be weaving in the end. So for this particular cowl or this particular swatch, I didn't have to add in another ball of yarn but you will have your other yarn here from where you've attached the new ball, but the process of weaving in the ends is exactly the same. So I like to flip to the wrong side, just so that if I don't do this perfectly, it's not seen from the front it's sort of hiding on the back of the cowl. So we're gonna thread, this yarn's a little thick for this tapestry needle. So I'm gonna fold it over and pinch and pull it through.

Let's see if I can get it all. There we go. So now I have it threaded on here and I'm just going to work my stitches, work my tail through my stitches. And because this yarn is super bulky, I actually think it's nice to sort of split the yarn like this, as I'm pulling and just take your time. This is something that for me, as as I've gone on my knitting journey, weaving in ends is something where it's gotten neater over time.

When I look at my first projects, my ends as I was weaving in was kind of a mess, but now it's gotten a lot better. So you just wanna sort of follow the path here. You can come up here, go over under etcetera. And because this yarn is so bulky, you are gonna it is gonna be a little bit more visible than say on a thinner yarn, because it's just a really thick yarn that we're working with. But it's to the wrong side, so it doesn't matter nobody's going to see it.

So there we go. I'm just trimming the last of the end off. And I'm gonna go ahead and do that for the other side. And now where you've attached your new ball of yarn you're gonna just do the same thing. You're gonna just take each of your tails and weave 'em in.

The only suggestion that I really have for that is just don't weave them in on top of each other, especially with this thick yarn. You're gonna want to make sure that you're sort of weaving them away from each other. So I would kinda bring one up here and one a little more down here, just so that you're not piling all those ends on top of each other, again, especially with this thick yarn it would make a really, it would make it really lumpy. So for the other end, I'm just doing the same thing, I'm just sorta coming down here and with this, you just want to sort of make sure you're not doing anything that's going to close, accidentally close up an eyelet hole. You're just don't wanna accidentally go like across one of those eyelets or anything like that.

Just so your stitch pattern looks nice. So I'm just coming up and down, up and down, just like this. You can split the plies, just like we did first time. There we go. And personally, when I'm weaving in ends I do like to try to get one, especially when I'm using have a lace pattern or eyelets here like try to try to get my final end just a little bit away from where the hole is just in case the end does peek through.

It's not then peeking through the hole to the other side. So we'll just kinda come right here in between these two eyelets. And again, we're just gonna we're just kinda give the yarn like just a little of pull and then you just wanna cut it really close, just be careful. There we go. So we have give it a little tug, there we go.

And then from the front, you can see, you can't even see where your ends were woven in at all. So now what we need to do is add the button. So if you already know how to sew on a button this might just be review, but I'm just again using a little tapestry needle and embroidery floss here. You can use regular needle and thread if you have a thinner yarn. I do have some tapestry needles that, that are made for yarn that will fit through these holes.

So it's really up to you if you do want to use thinner yarn. So now you just need to decide where your button is gonna go onto your cowl. So we'll just fold it over. And again, this is just a swatch, just very small. So I think I went to about the third ridge here, so around the third ridge.

So let's see if we like that. So just like that. And then your cowl would, cowl would open up like that. I think that's pretty good. Okay, so we're just gonna sorta set it here and just make sure that we like that placement.

It's also important to check to make sure that your button is actually gonna fit through the hole. You want it to be snug but not so snug that you're really stretching it but you don't wanna be too, too loose that it's gonna be coming apart. So we're good there too. So we're gonna put our button about right here. Now, because I like to cross stitch, I do this in a loop.

So I actually made it so that my thread here is doubled over and I have it at a loop. And then we're just going to come from the back and up finding one of those holes and then going back down, going back down, like, so, and then, because I started with the loop, I just bring my needle here through the loop like that and pull it and that'll just sorta secure it. And then you can just sew your button on the way you like to sew your buttons on. I'm not much of a sower so, I don't necessarily have the best technique with buttons but, just need to get that button on. So we could wear our cowl and show all our friends, our beautiful knitting project.

So let's just go through this a few times just to make sure it's nice and secure. There we go. And then we can just finish this off on the back. And I just sorta weave it through. And for button I will bring this through to make a knot.

I don't necessarily put knots in my knitting in general but if I have thread and using a button then I will put a little knot in there just to help secure it, trim it, and there we go. And then, as you can see we'll just bring our button through and our cowl is done. So let's bring our finished one in here the whole entire cowl here. So there you go. Now you've made your first project.

And so you may see in a pattern, something called blocking. And blocking is actually something you would want to do before you put your button on because we're gonna go ahead and you would be getting your cowl wet or damp or getting it near an iron. So blocking is a process of sorta setting your stitches. And it's really useful in projects like lace because you can stretch out your shawl or whatever lace project your knitting to really highlight different points of your stitch pattern. But it's also useful in a lot of other projects, just to even out your knitting and you are gonna most likely wash your project eventually.

And so you want to just sort of wash it right when you're done with it and have all your stitches nice. For something like a cowl here, it's probably not as important but if you were gonna block it, here's what you would do. It really does depend on the fiber that you're using. And there's lots that you could go into with blocking a piece. Something like this, this yarn is acrylic.

So you don't necessarily wanna get it wet and then stretch it out because it's a synthetic fiber. But what you could do before you put the button on is steam, put some steam on it with an iron. Again, you wouldn't want your button to be on there and you do not wanna touch your iron to your cowl because, because it is acrylic, you, you don't wanna melt your yarn. And so you could just sort of loosely steam it and sort of shape it the way you want, and then let it dry which won't take long cause it was just steam and then put your button on. If you were using a fiber that had an animal content like wool, you could soak it in a lukewarm water for about 20 minutes to let with some wool wash if you want, to let all of the water soak in to your cowl and then after that, you would take it out of the water gently wring out the water, wrap it up in a towel to squeeze more water out and then lay it out to dry completely.

Just making sure that you're sort of smoothing out all your stitches. You can get pins and things like that to help keep the piece in shape. And then once it's completely dry, go ahead and put your button on. But you would just wanna care for your cowl, following whatever instructions are on the ball band or yarn label for the yarn that you used. But that's it.

Now you've made this cowl and you're ready to wear it and show it off to all of your friends. Congratulations, you've finished your first knitting project. I really hope that you enjoyed taking this time and learning to knit with me here at The Knitting Circle. If you did enjoy this 14 day series, I hope that you will go to our website theknittingcircle.com and check out more knitting videos. We have hundreds of knitting videos for you to enjoy, and we have everything from basic videos, which review many of the things that we did here in this series.

And we have all sorts of other videos to more advanced techniques, different things you might wanna try like lace, cables, brioche. There's so much in knitting to explore. Thank you so much for joining me. I'll see you again soon.