Now years ago when I was a girl and my mother struggled unsuccessfully to teach me to knit (something which was achieved ten years later by a fellow student at University) there was only one way to cast on and cast off. Actually that statement is probably objectively untrue but, as far as anyone who we knew who knitted was concerned, and in those days that would be just about every woman you met, you cast on using your thumb and you cast off by knitting two stitches and then passing one over the other, repeat to end.
When I started knitting again a few years ago it was borne in upon me that in actual fact there are many different variations on these simple operations to start and finish your knitting and it was said that some are more fitting for certain types of knitting than others. I didn't pay a lot of attention to be honest. I carried on using my thumb and doing the pass one stitch over thing, and as far as I could see there was no great detrimental effect on anything I made.
However I recently made a small shawl and the instructions on the pattern for that were adamant; you must use Jenny's Surprisingly Stretchy Bind Off or you will not be able to block the points on this shawl properly. Well the points were half the point of making the thing, if you'll pardon the expression, and the designer seemed certain that they needed this surprisingly stretchy cast off method so without donning a bonnet I betook myself off to the internet* for a tutorial on how to do it.
* I doubt anyone will get this reference but I couldn't resist it since it is a bit of a family saying and very funny. It's based on a sentence in a book by that mistress of romantic purple prose Ethel M Dell and the original sentence reads 'She donned a bonnet and betook herself off to the raspberry bed'. My mother and I both found this hysterically funny and I adopted it because you can use it in all sorts of situations - give it a try, you'd be surprised.
Anyway it didn't look too complicated , although it did look quite time consuming, so I used it and I suppose I could say that I now know two ways to cast off knitting, except that here we are a week later and I can't remember how to do it. However if I ever need it again I know where to look it up. I don't know that I would call it surprisingly stretchy, but then I'm not Jenny the Inventor and I suppose she is allowed to call it what she likes. Here is a picture of the cast off edge
and below is a picture of the blocking process. For those of you who are not knitters and are still with me blocking is the thing you do after you've finished knitting to get the piece to its required size and shape. There is a whole mystique around blocking; whether it's necessary, how best to do it, whether you should do it before you sew a garment up, or after, but the one thing that everyone agrees on is that lace knitting definitely needs blocking otherwise it looks like a scruffy mess. I do not do a lot of lace knitting, because I am not very good at it. I think myself that knitters fall mainly into one of two camps; they knit lace or they knit cables, and I'm a cable kind of a gal. However this shawl thing had a lacy edge and if I wanted people to see that clearly after I put a lot of effort into getting it right it needed to be blocked. So I sent off for the appropriate technology - thin springy wires and some evilly large and sharp T pins and did it properly. For the first time in my life. And as I said, here is the picture to prove it. And by the way if I thought Jenny's Surprisingly Fiddly Stretchy Bind Off was time consuming that was as nothing, nothing I tell you, to the time it takes to stretch and pin out a shawl with a pointy lace edge.
I have to say though that at the end of the day it was, surprisingly, worth the effort.
That's beautiful! Well worth the faffing about. I pay other knitters to block mine..... 😮😮
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