It has an excellent cast-on with a brilliant name, the ‘Chinese Waitress cast-on’, but what about a cast-off? I had to go hunting…
The Neck & Neck MKAL is designed to challenge knitters to advance their skills, to try new things, to learn new techniques. Little do they know it has also challenged the designers to do the same!
Luckily I quickly found a website that lists cast-ons with cast-offs that match them. This suggested the ‘double chain cast-off’ as a good match for the Chinese Waitress cast-on. Woot! So I went and found a video tutorial for this new-to-me technique and tried it out. A few hours of casting on, knitting a few rows, then casting off. I tried it with several different yarns, and a variety of needle sizes. Alas, I wasn’t impressed. It was much looser than the beautiful cast-on it is supposed to emulate, with very visible bumps that aren’t in the cast-on.
So, as is my wont, I then spent several more hours devising a double chain cast-off that truly satisfied my fussy notions of what constitutes a really good match for the legendary cast-on that a hungry knitter in Beijing was once taught by her waitress. Here it is:
Thank you so much!
Beautiful! Simple and easy! Thank you, you brilliant knitter!
Just what aI was looking for!
Fabulous. Thank you so much.
more than intersting, I’ll use this method for my next knitting work. Thank you for sharing.
Lovely. Thank you
Had just found instructions for The Chinese Waitress cast-on and loved it but was looking desperately for a matching cast off and now I’ve found your wonderful Obsessive cast off – thank you, thank you, you’re a star!
How do you determine how much yarn do you need to complete this bind-off so you don’t run short mid-way through?
If in doubt loosely twist your yarn around your needle for the number of stitches you need to cast off, plus 10 to 20 more times for the tail plus margin of error.