Making an Invisible Join at the End of the Round

Working single crochet in the round without joins makes a lovely seamless fabric. But when you fasten off after working in the round, there is a small jog or bump where the last stitch was made. This isn’t really a problem, but it does catch your eye, and it would be nice to finish off the project in a completely smooth and seamless way.

In this video, Brenda K. B. Anderson shows us how to fasten off without leaving that telltale bump along the edge. After completing her piece, she makes a slip stitch. This stitch is shorter than the single crochet stitches that she used to make the piece, so it helps to avoid that stair-step jog at the end of the round. After making the slip stitch, she cuts the yarn and uses the crochet hook to pull the ending tail all the way through the last stitch.

Brenda threads the yarn tail onto a yarn needle and inserts the needle through the following stitch from the back to the front, under both loops. She then inserts the needle in through the center-top of the last stitch (the slip stitch) and out through the wrong side of the work. She cautions us not to pull too tightly on the yarn as we make this stitch, because we want it to blend in (size-wise) with the other stitches. She instructs us to weave the tail in on the Wrong Side of the piece as we normally would.

This is a quick and easy upgrade to a regular fasten off, and it makes the edge of your work look perfectly polished! Try this technique on hats, amigurumi pieces, circular patches, polka-dots, etc. It is so satisfying to achieve that super smooth edge!