Dropped stitches, and the other recoverable disasters

A knitted fabric is one continuous strand held as a chain of loops, each passing through the one below. A stitch on the needle is a loop nothing is holding shut. When it comes off, the loop below has nothing through it, so it opens too, and so does the one below that — the ladder you see running down the fabric is that unzipping, one row at a time.

It stops on its own eventually, but not reliably, and the first thing to do is not to fix it. It is to secure it: put a stitch marker, a safety pin or a spare needle through the loose loop so it cannot run further while you work out what to do. Everything is easier from there, and the number of rows it ran is the whole of the damage.

A stitch dropped one row is picked up with the needle tip and put back on, facing the same way as its neighbours. A stitch that has run several rows is climbed back up with a crochet hook, pulling the loose loop through each rung of the ladder in turn, from the bottom up. Both are quick, and the second is much easier than it sounds and much easier than reknitting.

The one thing to check afterwards is that the stitch is mounted the same way round as the ones either side of it — the leading leg at the front. A stitch put back twisted works perfectly well and leaves a small tight mark that is visible forever in stocking stitch, which is annoying rather than fatal.

• Too many stitches — You have made a stitch without meaning to, nearly always by carrying the yarn over the needle when moving it between knit and purl. Count back to the last row you know was right and unpick to there.
• Too few stitches — Usually two stitches worked as one, or a dropped stitch that has already run and closed up. Same answer.
• A mistake several rows down — Either unpick stitch by stitch, which is slow and safe, or pull the needle out and rip back to a row, which is fast and needs care putting the stitches back on. A lifeline — a length of contrast yarn threaded through a whole row before starting something risky — makes the second option safe, and is what experienced knitters use.
• Unpicking one stitch at a time — Called tinking, which is knitting backwards. Worth learning as the standard response to noticing an error within a row or two.

The habit worth building underneath all of this is looking at the fabric every few rows rather than only at the needles. Nearly every one of these is trivial when caught in the row it happened and tedious when caught forty rows later, and the difference is entirely a matter of when you looked.