Cast On, Bind Off: 211 Ways to Begin and End Your Knitting

Cast On, Bind Off: 211 Ways to Begin and End Your Knitting

Cap Sease

Martingale, 2012

162 pages, Craft Reference

Kindle, Hardcover (Spiral), Paperback

Purchased at the current price

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The cover is very attractive and tells you immediately that it’s a book about knitting with its two wooden knitting needles and the examples of knitting arranged in a grid. The examples are in different colors, so it’s colorful all set against a pristine white backdrop.

The author is home taught, as in her grandmother taught her how to knit. That’s the best kind, but don’t feel bad if you learned in school or had to take classes in a yarn shop or a friend taught you. Any way you learned is valid as long as you learned, feel secure in your technique, and get good results. If you don’t feel you have either or both casting on or binding off nailed down or you’re looking for a different technique or edge, this is the book for you.

Ms. Sease speaks in an easy to understand style that makes you feel as if you are sitting with her over tea and learning the techniques from her in person. She does start out with a few charts. First to list the types of cast ons, then the bind offs. Then she lists the the pairs that go together to give you matching edges. I thought that would be a particularly helpful list for future projects.

From the lists, she jumps right into how to do each of the cast ons and then each of the bind offs. She has them broken down into categories, such as those that start from a slip knot, long tail, and such. She shares the advantages and disadvantages of each and has very clear illustrations showing how each is done. I felt between her worded description of the stitches and the illustrations there wasn’t a technique I wouldn’t be able to do.

I bought this book because I couldn’t find the stretchy bind off I needed on Pinterest for my current project and I really needed to get it off the needles. I found this book on Amazon at a reasonable price and downloaded it immediately. I skimmed through it looking for my stretchy bind off and finished my project. Then I went back and read through the whole book. I was so excited about bind offs when I finished. I want to try some of the fancier ones sometime. There are some really pretty ones that create picot, curled, or looped edges that I thought I’d like to try just for the fun of it. I highly recommend this book whether you are a beginning knitter or an expert knitter. Just imagine, 211 ways to start or stop!