Matching Cast on and Bind off

Recently I got Debbie New's "Unexpected Knitting" out of my library. What an inspiring book! There are all kinds of off-the-wall techniques in there. Some of the garments are not things I would wear, but the techniques sure piqued my interest!

I started on a "scribble lace" shawl, which, being knit on 10mm balloons, didn't take long to finish:

[scribble lace shawl]

The "scribble" is a single row ("back" and no "forth") of bulky yarn, and the background is lace-weight yarn (in this case, a silk/mohair blend).  You use double-points or a circular needle so that you can shove the work to the end of the needle where your working yarn is; this changes periodically because of the single thick row. It takes about 100m of thick yarn and 4x that in thin to make a 32"x70" stole, if you have (on average) 4 rows of thin yarn to every 1 row of thick.  For this project I increased and decreased the number of rows of thin yarn from 3-5 (sometimes even 6) and back again to give the stripes a subtle "motion".

I love this idea. It is a fantastic way to showcase those homespun art-yarns that I love but, until now, had no idea what to do with! You can use ribbon, too.

The one thing that is useful to know when making these shawls is how to match the cast-on and bind-off. They both need to be quite elastic because the fabric is so stretchy. Start and end with the thick yarn to give a stable edge to the shawl.

I used a "knit-on cast-on", and my bind-off, which matches very closely, is variously referred to as a "knit bind off", a "lace knit bind off", or a "russian bind off". Here's a write-up. It's pretty easy. I use it all the time for toe-up socks. For me, this bind-off falls between the YoBo (yarn-over bind-off or JSBO) - which I find very loose - and the standard knit-one-pass-over bind off (which is too tight for toe-up socks).

[russian/lace knit bind-off]

Picot Cast-on and Bind-off

I've been on a tear with toe-up, "forethought" heel socks lately. So I'm becoming pretty adept with JSSBO (a variant of "the yarn-over bind off" which is a pretty standard technique).
But this bind-off isn't particularly "pretty". For ladies' lacy socks there's another option: a picot bind-off. Here it is, in summary:

1. decide the size of your picots (N stitches, where N=1, 2, or 3)
2. Cast off 2 stitches.
3. Slip the remaining single stitch on your right needle back to the left.
4. knit-on cast-on (or, alternatively, cable cast-on) N stitches
5. bind off N+2 stitches (two more than your picot size)

Repeat steps 3-5 until you've bound off all your stitches.

This works well and is quite stretchy - there's no hard "edge" to the sock. You can make the picots any size, but I find for a traditional look that 1, 2, or 3 gives good results (that's not to say that a 10-stitch picot couldn't look funky...it'd probably flop over and look almost fringe-like...) The spacing between the picots is always 2 stitches in this recipe, it's determined by step 5 where you bind off 2 more than you cast on (and by step 2 where you position the first picot). Feel free to improvise!

There's a matching cast-on, which you can probably unvent yourself because it is obvious once you've got the cast-off in your head:

1. decide the size of your picots (N stitches, where N=1, 2, or 3)
2. do a slip knot to start.
3. knit-on cast-on (or, alternatively, cable cast-on) N+2 stitches (two more than your picot size).
4. bind off N stitches
5. slip remaining single stitch on your right needle to the left.

repeat steps 3-5 until you have the desired number of stitches. Again I've made the picot spacing 2 stitches, but this is adjustable.

I've made  fingerless mitts (pattern here) with picot edges on both ends. They match quite nicely.

[Mitaines or fingerless gloves]

Here's another "bumpy-and-stretchy" cast on option: the Channel Islands cast-on.