Orange sweater back complete

I completed the back of the orange sweater and am now on to the sleeves. One element of the back that I think bears remark and display is the bind off in the center.

A knitting blog I read and enjoy is TECHKnitting^TM, in which the author examines common small imperfections that regularly crop up in knitting and presents one or sometimes even several methods for dealing with them. A while back she discussed an improvement you can make to the ordinary chain bind-off in the center of a garment. You work an extra stitch and bind it off before proceeding to bind off the ones you are supposed to bind off, and it provides an extra supportive connection between the live stitches and the start of the bound-off ones. I read the post a while back and happened to remember it before I did the center stitch bind-off on this piece, fortunately. I also took a few pictures; it was really hard to get one that showed what she is talking about, but I think if you look closely (and click to enlarge pics, if you wish), you can see.

In this first picture, you can see next to where the needle is holding back the edge (which wants very badly to curl, as it's not yet been blocked) there's an extra loop between the last live stitch and the first cast-off one.



Without the needle holding back the edge, you can hardly tell at all that this has been done - only, to my eye, it looks like a very solid connection is there to avoid being pulled into a "stretched-out mess," to put it in TECHKnitter's words.