Friday, December 26, 2008

Leftover Sock yarn & a Mitered bind off

I've got leftover sock yarn. Most of us do. Some people ignore it. Some people make multi-yarn socks. Some people - the more crazy among us - decide to knit a sock yarn afghan.



Yup. you got it. I went over the deep end. I'm starting to make mitered sock yarn squares. They're 3" square. They take less than an hour to make. I figure I'll have enough to make an afghan before its time for me to move into a nursing home, if I'm lucky.



The squares are very basic.
CO 40 sts placing a stitch marker between 20 & 21. They're knit in garter stitch.
Odd rows. knit to 2 sts before the SM, k2tog, sl sm, sl 1, k1, psso, knit to end.
Even rows. Knit across.
Continue until 4 sts are left. BO.



Now here's where I figured out something different. I hate the way a regular BO looks on the end of mitered squares. After playing around a litle bit I came up with a Bind off that I really like. I'm sure there are others that use this but I haven't seen this before.







Mitered Bind Off.

Work the last row (wrong side) knit across.
K2tog, k2tog, pass first st over. break yarn and pull thru last stitch.

This gives a nice tight finish that looks very similar to the beginning and doesn't have that odd looking stitch that likes to hang out on the edge of regular sind off.

I'm going to try doing a k2tog on the last couple stiches of a regular bind off and see if it helps the look there also.

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