Knitting Tutorial - How To Seam Ribbing Impeccably

During the last months I receive quiet a lot of emails from you with different questions - helping with deciphering the pattern instructions, technical things, stitch pattern explanations, etc. I try my best to answer as detailed as possible, but after receiving several quiet similar questions, I thought that maybe I should start collecting them and later put the tutorials together, so I can refer you to them when you are missing this information. So, if you have some knitting emergencies happening, please, feel free to contact me at giftofknitting@gmail.com - I'll try my best to help and if it is a repeating question, I'll create a visual tutorial for more people to use it. I usually answer during 3-4 days.

One of the recent questions that repeated itself over several emails was "How To Seam Ribbing Impeccably"? In some patterns you will find instruction to seam shoulders using an invisible horizontal seam. The horizontal seam works great for the stockinette stitch, for example; but if you are trying to put together the ribbing, the seam isn't invisible anymore - you will end up with this "jog":

As you can see the stitch columns are not perfectly aligned, they are slightly unbalanced. On one hand - who will notice that at the shoulder seam?! But if you are a perfectionist and this "hiccup" is bothering you, there are some ways to fix it.

  • First, you can ignore the knitting pattern instructions to bind off the shoulders and then seam them together. But instead place the shoulder stitches on the stitch holder and then use three-needle bind off. This way the stitch columns will be perfectly aligned. There are numerous tutorials out there that walk you through three-needle bind off, so I won't cover it here.

  • There is one more way that you can use, especially if you want to have a pretty sturdy seam. Instead of horizontal seam, you will use crochet slip chain that will align the stitches perfectly.

Let me walk you through the latter.

How to Seam Ribbing in Knitting

If you need to see a bigger image and read the full description to it, click on the image.

And here is 2x2 rib fabric - both right and wrong sides. You can see how the jog completely disappeared and your perfectionist self can be happy now :)

I'm always happy to see my tutorials on your Pinterest board, if you like it, of course!

Thank you for your questions that inspired this tutorial - feel free to send more :)

Have a wonderful day!

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