Picture this: You’ve just spent two months making a beautiful textured vest as a gift. It has two beautiful cables running from the back to front. But as you’re about to finish it, you notice something strange about one of the cables. It turns out you started twisting it in the wrong direction halfway through the vest! What do you do?
This example might seem like a gargantuan task, but fixing things is part of the making process. Don’t panic! You can do this. Although some knitters might be inclined to rip out all their rows back up until the start of the mistake, that will make you lose a lot of your work for no reason. For these types of knitting mistakes, where there is simply an incorrect stitch that was made many rows below, the solution can actually be quite simple. Unzip! Knitting can be deconstructed vertically without affecting the stitches to the left and right of the mistake.
Single Stitch Mistake
In its simplest form, you can vertically undo a column of knitting from a single stitch until you reach your mistake, then pick each stitch back up in the way that is indicated in the pattern. We mentioned this method in a previous post about fixing your knitting. This technique is commonly done using a crochet hook. The dropped bars are picked up through the loop from back to front to create a knit stitch and from front to back to create a purl stitch.
More complex mistake
This principle can be extended to a section of stitches that need to be undone vertically. This applies to the example from the beginning of the post. Here, a section of 8 stitches needed to be undone to about halfway down the vest. Then, the stitches needed to be reworked, twisting the cable in the correct direction. If you want to see a video documenting the repair, check it out here. When reworking multiple stitches like this, it is best to keep them on a small double-pointed needle and work each row, so that you are always working all stitches on the correct row.
Mistakes happen and we shouldn’t let them get us down. There are many ways you might deal with a mistake. This could be leaving it in, ripping all your knitting back to the mistake, or taking on a repair job like this one. I hope this helped you realize that repairing a mistake in your work might not be as daunting as it seems.
