Hello everyone. I am so glad to have found you - after a frustrating hour of trying to figure this out myself and realizing I never would. I am in the process of making a vest, my first garment, and the armhole instructions have me completely stumped. I hope all of you don’t fall on the floor laughing hysterically, but here goes:
the instructions say, “At the start of next 2 rows bind off 8 sts.” I bound off the eight stitches on the first row, but now what do I do? My yarn is way back there at the edge of the row. I assume I just keep knitting, but how do I do that now that I’m disconnected from my ball of yarn?
It’s a cold, rainy day in North Carolina - perfect for knitting - so I’ll be very grateful if you can get me going again.
Bind off 8 stitches at the beginning of the row, finish the row. Turn you work and bind off 8 stitches at the beginning of this row, then finish working the row. You will not be cutting your yarn at this point - you are simply binding off stitches at each edge in order to start the armhole shaping. After binding off for those 2 rows you will follow whatever the next instruction is.
Knitqueen,
Thank you for your reply. Sorry to say, I’m still confused. Maybe I’m binding off wrong. The problem is when I bind off, the yarn stays behind - at the beginning of the row where I started binding off. I gather from what you are saying, the yarn should be moving along as I bind off so that I can resume knitting after binding off the eight stitches. Right?
Don’t apologise – that’s what we’re here for and all of us have had dorky questions at some point or other.
I’m not exactly sure how you’re binding off, but the method sounds like part of the problem, yeah … most of the bind-off methods I’ve seen are basically methods of knitting across the row but binding off as you go, which means the yarn follows you across (and is available for normal knitting after the bind-off).
If your method of binding off leaves the yarn where you start, it might work to bind off at the end of a row rather than at the beginning – depending on the method, you might want to do it a row later rather than a row earlier (i.e. instead of row X being “bind off at the beginning and knit across” and row X+1 being “bind off at the beginning and knit across”, do row X “knit across”, row X+1 “knit across and bind off at the end”, row X+2 "knit across and bind off at the end) so the size works out okay.
and all of us have had dorky questions at some point or other.