Look at this photo! Experienced knitters will spot my lopsided leaf where the safety-pin stitch marker sits. Less experienced and non-knitters will be scratching their heads, saying “What? Where?” The line of decreases that forms the right edge of that leaf has a mistake in it. I did the reverse row and started the next right side row. When I got to that leaf and knitted it, I found a huge hole in the leaf. Not good!
I worked back a few stitches and repeated the pattern out loud as I worked the stitches and still had a hole. I worked back a few stitches and tried changing where the yarn-over was placed but that just made it worse. I faced the inevitable. I had to go back and fix the error three rows below. Now, if this was a shawl for me, I might shrug my shoulders and keep working. This shawl is NOT for me. It will be donated to a silent auction at a charitable event. I want this shawl to raise as much money as it can. I cannot leave the hole in the leaf!
How do I fix it? There are three ways to fix an error in lace knitting (in most knitting really). I can use my life line. I can frog it. Or I can tink it.
Oh no! She’s inventing words! No, I’m not. These are three skills knitters eventually learn. I’ll do my best to explain each and then I’ll tell you what method I chose and why.
A life line is a contrasting strand of yarn pulled through each stitch at a critical portion of a pattern. It is frequently used at the end of a lace repeat or when the lace pattern transitions into the next part of the design. It is also used when a garment starts having major shaping taking place – armholes, necklines, etc. If you make a serious error, you pull your needles out of your work and rip out until you come to the life line. You reinsert your needles, picking each stitch up from the life line and you are ready to go.
Frogging is pulling out your needles and ripping out multiple rows or even an entire piece of work. The name is a play on words. Frogs say “ribbit, ribbit.” Some knitter some time back thought it sounded a lot like “Rip it! Rip it!” Frogging became the word in a knitter’s vocabulary that mean ripping out a lot of work. When you have ripped back as far as you want, you will have a row of tiny loops. You must pick up each loop and place it on a needle, taking care not to miss any or to cause any to run like pantyhose. Then you figure out how far back you ripped and start working again.
Last, there’s tinking. Tink is knit spelled backwards. Tinking is reversing the knit process. It is the act of undoing your knitting stitch by stitch; taking the worked yarn out of the finished stitch and placing the stitch on the opposite needle with the rest of the unworked stitches. [Reality check here – we are talking knitting with two or more pointed needles and not crocheting, done with one hook. You are with me on that, right?] Tinking is done when you only have a small area to rip out, when you know specifically where the error is or when working with a fuzzy yarn that likes to grab hold of itself and snarl its fuzzy little fibers together. Think mohair. Mohair likes to do that. Tinking allows you to gently separate those fibers and undo a stitch.
What do you think I decided to do? If you’ve followed this blog since the start of this shawl, and looked at the photos, you will see that I have NOT used any lifelines. I was going to put one in after I’d finished the lace and before I started shaping the top of the shawl. I guess I won’t be using a life line to fix my error.
Frog it? for three rows? I don’t like frogging lace unless I’m ripping out back to the foundation. I have a lot of yarn-overs in this pattern. Those tend to get lost when picking up the stitches. That stitch marker is going to fall out when I rip out and I won’t know where the mistake is. I have to go just to the mistake, but did I rip out too many rows? Did I quit one row too soon and the mistake is still there, ready to laugh at me?
In the end, I decided the best solution for me was to tink it. I had one mistake that I could clearly see and that I could use a removable stitch marker to locate. I know that there are 16 stitches between each ring stitch marker on my needles. Undo a stitch, move it to the other needle, after 16 “undo’s,’ pass the marker to the next needle, At the end of the row, mark which row I had undone. Tinking is slower than actual knitting. This is a task that I started Saturday and I’m not quite done yet. I’m literally undoing roughly 500 stitches. I’m not enjoying it, but it’s the right thing to do. This shawl will be beautiful when it’s done and whoever purchases it will have a treasure.
Knitting Twigs into Trees 