I’m stitching a large throw which has a lot of cable work in it. The pattern is a six row repeat and the last row is simply a mixture of knit and purl stitches. Do I knit (or purl) the stitches as the pattern determines and just bind my way off as I go? I know it shouldn’t be this difficult! But so often I finish a project to find that the bound off edge ends up looking sloppy, not matching the rest of the piece or even lay like it should.
Binding off correctly
What you are describing is binding off in pattern and its usually the way to go about binding off.
Sounds like you’re BO in patt unless there’s some kind of border after the cabling. If no border, best to BO cables in the row after the twist so they’re snug otherwise the cable will tend to flare too much. Assuming there’s no border or transitions, you’ll most likely want to replicate in the BO how the cable looked at the CO edge.
cam
Actually, if you can, BO 3-4 rows after the cable cross, it will help the edge lie flatter. Binding off is only passing the one st over the other, so it’s really like knitting any other row except the sts aren’t left on the right needle when you’re done.