No Yarn Bind Off

If you’re stash busting and trying to use all your yarn in a project, or you’re just a poor planner, there may come a time when you don’t have enough yarn to do a standard bind off so you need to use a no yarn bind off.

This is actually really quick and easy to do and it looks good. No one will ever be able to tell you used a no yarn bind off!

Preparing for a No Yarn Bind Off

If you’re going to bind off without using yarn, you need to be able to finish your bind off where your yarn end is so that you can finish off the last loop.

If you’ve been working in the round, this is easy and you can just start from the first stitch of the round and work your way around.

If you’re knitting flat, you’ll want to start your bind off at the end of the row where the yarn end is not. If you’re working on a circular needle knitting flat, just slide the end without the yarn tail to the end of the needle.

For this example I was working a project flat on straight needles, so I grabbed a circular needle and slipped all my stitches onto it so I’d have access to the stitches at the other end of the project.

You don’t have to use the same size needle as you worked your project with. It can be the same size or smaller, whatever you have handy.

How to Bind Off with No Yarn

That’s all you need to do to set up a bind off without using yarn. Now just slip the first two stitches onto your right hand needle as if you were knitting them.

Pass the first stitch over the second stitch and off the needle, just like you’d do in a normal bind off.

Slip over another stitch and repeat.

You can use the circular needle to work these even if it’s not the same size you used to knit with because you’re not changing the size of the stitch in any way. But you can also bring in your correctly sized needle to work with bind off if you want to.

When you get down to the last stitch and have pulled the second to last stitch over it, you’ll be back to your yarn tail and can fasten off the last stitch as you normally would.

Pros and Cons of a No Yarn Bind Off

I find that binding off without using yarn in this way makes a very firm bind off, which isn’t ideal for a lot of projects, but can be beneficial.

The main pro of this bind off is that it doesn’t use any yarn so if you don’t have enough yarn to do a bind off you can still finish your project without having to rip out any rows.

I don’t think I’d ever use this bind off on purpose, but when you need to finish a project without using any yarn it’s a handy thing to know.