Minimalist Seaming

Let this Get Ready – Get Set – Go instruction outline help you make an easy, no-show seam for a beaded garter stitch cuff.

The Beading Hearts Friendship Bracelet is first knitted sideways in garter stitch as a strip of fabric. To form that fabric into a circular bracelet, there has to be some sort of seam to join the beginning and end of the strip. I want to bring to your attention some of the details included in the pattern that help you make an easy, no-show seam for this project.

Although it might be tempting to not be concerned about how a project will be finished when you are just in the first stage of the project, there is just as much thought that should go into starting a project as in finishing the project. I call it “finishing starts at the beginning”.

Get Ready

A good start leads to a pleasing finish. When beginning the Friendship Bracelet, use a simple half-hitch cast on.

Using the simple half-hitch cast on method will minimize seam bulk when later joining the strip of knitted fabric. The simple half-hitch cast on is made by forming a backwards loop of the yarn on your thumb, then inserting needle tip through the loop (sometimes referred to as a simple cast on, or one-tailed cast on, or the thumb method of casting on). You can also review this previous Knit HeartStrings article – Simple Cast On :: a time and place for simplicity.

Get Set

For a beaded garter stitch strip that will later be joined, the first knitted row is a WS row.

This sets up the first part of the sequence of “ridges” so that when the cast on is joined to the end of the fabric, there will be a matching “valley” between the ridge of the first row of knitting and the last row of knitting when viewed from the RS.

Go

After fabric strip is long enough AND completing a WS row, bind off.

This sets up the 2nd part of the sequence of ridges so that when the cast on is joined to the end of the fabric, there will be a matching valley.

Finish

Sew together the cast on and bound off edges with the yarn tail left after binding off and cutting.

For sewing, you can either

1. hold the RS’s together and whip stitch from the WS the edges of the cast on and bound off edges together, or

2. hold the WS’s together and graft from the RS the loops of the first WS row with the loops of the last row (the intervening row of Kitchener stitch grafting forms the “valley” between the 2 ridges of WS rows).

In both cases, the fabric as seen on the RS will have virtually an invisible seam line. Even though the WS will have some extra bulk at the seam line, it will be minimal. Not a thing to really cause any problem since this beaded garter stitch friendship bracelet has a definite RS (i.e. the side that the beads show up on), the WS is not intended to ever be seen when worn anyway.

Tip: After the seam is sewn, the yarn tail used for seaming will be at one edge of the bracelet, and the cast on tail at the other edge of the bracelet. Therefore you do not have 2 yarn tails at the same edge producing extra bulk at one edge and none at the other.

More than you wanted to know? I hope not. But if it doesn’t make sense or mean anything now, just know that as a member of KnitHeartStrings that you can come back and look at  later.

p.s. Alternatively, there is a slightly more involved minimalist seaming method that substitutes a 3-needle bind off and eliminates the sewing step. Would you like me to cover that later?