Fix Your Most Disastrous Knitting Mistakes

Simple solutions with very interesting names

Problem: You made a mistake in your current row.

Solution: Tinking. In other words, just carefully undo the knitting you've done and put the loops back on the left hand needle. Notice that "tink" is "knit" spelled backwards? You're just unknitting and fixing things up.

Problem: You made your knitting mistakes a few rows ago.

Solution: Frogging (don't you love these knitter names?). Frogging means sliding your knitting off the needle and carefully unraveling the last few rows. You should be left with a bunch of loops standing up: just slip these back onto the lefthand needle.

Problem: You count your stitches and you're missing a few.

Solution: This is called a dropped stitch (because somewhere along the way, you dropped it off the needle). Figure out where the gap is and count down the horizontal rows. Slip a crochet hook through the stitch and pull the next horizontal row back through. Repeat this until you get to the top, where you can slide the rescued stitch onto the left needle.

Problem: You count your stitches and you have too many.

Solution: Actually, to the best of my knowledge this is one of the few knitting mistakes without a cute name to fix it. It's a common mistake for novice knitters to pick up an extra stitch. If you count them and you've only picked up one or two extra, your best bet is to just knit two together at either end of the project as many times as necessary to shrink the work back down.

If you've really made a lot of knitting mistakes, though, you might have to frog the whole piece. It's frustrating to rip apart all that work, but look on it as practice: better to stop and go back than finish a piece you won't be happy with. And once you've done this once or twice, you'll never make the same knitting mistakes again.