One extra stitch.
January 13th, 2008
That’s apparently all it takes to grind me to a halt for a week. I was plowing away on the F&F lapghan (using the final colour in my stash of Cotton Fleece, actually) when I got to the end of a lace row and discovered I had six stitches for the garter stitch border instead of five.
I heaved a great sigh like a sack of potatoes, and then moved myself and the lapghan and the yarn to a seat under a bright light, and then started looking back to see what I’d done. Since the non-lace rows are plain old and purls, I thought this would be easy. Or easy-ish. Or at least achievable. But no such luck. I could not see anything wrong, but the math kept coming out the same. So after the third close examination and the third count, I knew it was tinking time.
A normal person would ask–and if I was a normal person, so would I–why I was tinking instead of just ripping back to the last lace row. (The most logical row, as the math apparently came out fine at that point or I would have had my freakout back then.) My answer is that I would have ripped back if I had found and pinned the error, ensuring that I didn’t rip back beyond it. Since I didn’t find the error just by looking, tinking was the safest (and slowest) way to detect the problem without having to do a lot of extra re-knitting.
Of course, I would have said that before this particular extra stitch. Not only did I end up having to tink back to the last lace row anyway, but this meant that I had to tink back four long rows of lapghan–counting stitches every row–without ever finding the extra stitch.
That’s right, I never found it. But I made my way to the end of the last lace row, then turned the thing around. Counted. The math was suddenly strangely right. So whatever it was was gone, which was fine by me.
I imagine what happened is that, as I was knitting the row above the last lace row, one of the yarnovers slipped off the needle. Instead of picking up the one stitch, I somehow picked up a second phantom stitch as well. Then it was knit knit knit whoops and Bob’s your uncle. The same thing could easily happen with any other lace pattern–except that most lace is composed of alternating rows of straight knitting (or purling) and a row of yo & k2tog. F&F has a lace row every four rows–so an undetected error can subtly wreak its havoc for that much longer.
When I’m done these next two rows, I’m officially at the halfway point of the lapghan (he says, not having measured it) so it will be time to figure out if I want to repeat the colours in sequence or rearrange them ‘randomly’ for the second half.
11 Comments Add your own
1. Suzanne V. (Yarnhog) | January 13th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Oh, that makes me want to cry. I hate tinking. Hate it passionately. But sometimes there is no way around it. How frustrating that the error was so far back.
2. Emily | January 13th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
Oh man, that’s rough! I usually just try to sneak in a decrease somewhere to make up for it and *hope* for the best. Isn’t it true that no one but you would ever know?
3. Steph F. | January 13th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Okay, I just looked up what tinking is, and that sounds horrific. I’m still not really sure what the difference between that and ripping is (sorry for my obvious newbie-ness!) but still, eww. Sorry you had to go through that much trouble!
4. david_demchuk | January 13th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
Tinking, as most of you now know, is the painstaking ‘un-knitting’ of the stitches that you have just knit. It involves working backwards, shoving the right needle in the stitch just knit on the left needle and pulling it up so that you can release the yarn while still holding onto the stitch beneath. Slide that stitch back onto the right needle and move to the next one on the left.
Ripping is where you take the needles out of your knitting and pull your working yarn, watching the stitches disappear as you pull, until you go a stitch or two beyond your mistake. As you can tell, removing the mistake is much faster–but then you have to pick up all these stitches, if not on the original needles then at least on some kind of needles, and reknit to where you started ripping, and beyond. I am lousy at picking up stitches after ripping–as the work I do picking up the stitches makes the others along the row shrink and fall out of their loops–so usually have to use circular sock needles to do it.
I could try to leave the mistake in (assuming that, if I couldn’t find it, neither could anyone else) but there was no guarantee that I wouldn’t knit up another eight rows, look back and see an extra hole in one of my fans where no hole should be. My feeling is, if you discover the error and it can be resolved, then you should resolve it. Because even if no one else knows, you’ll know, and it will wear away at your knitting morale.
Also, Elizabeth Zimmerman encouraged us to be the bosses of our own knitting–theoretically you should be able to solve any problem in your knitting even if it takes drastic, radical action (like snipping into the middle of a row, pulling out the yarn, putting the live stitches on finer needles and kitchener stitching them with another length of yarn to erase a mistake). It takes courage, but it teaches your knitting–and you–who’s really running the show.
5. Nadine | January 14th, 2008 at 3:04 am
David, I admire your fortitude! It all sounds like a horrific PITA to me, but then I realize that Zimmerman’s thoughts could be applied to quilting as well as knitting. I do the same type of thing when I quilt and something goes wrong, and sometimes it does require scary, drastic action with sharp implements, but it’s not AS scary to me as errors in knitting, because I’m clueless and abysmal at knitting!
Just how clueless? The whole time I was reading your post, I kept thinking you were missing the “h” in “tinking” and some of what you wrote didn’t make sense until I read the comments. Yes, that’s really clueless!
6. david_demchuk | January 14th, 2008 at 7:28 am
Oh, Nadine–you’re not clueless! There are plenty of people, including knitters, who don’t know what tinking is…and, God willing, I hope they never have to.
And, if it’s any consolation, I’ve made exactly one (tiny) quilt and I would describe myself as clueless and abysmal at quilting
7. Nichole D. | January 14th, 2008 at 9:04 am
Ugh, I hate tinking! Glad it was only a few rows back, even if they were very long rows…Although, ripping, to me, is so much more depressing than tinking.
Good luck with no more extra stitches!
8. knitxcore | January 15th, 2008 at 11:52 am
haha. i always tink. I’m deathly afraid of overfrogging. don’t you just love when problems fix themselves????
9. Jen | January 18th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Ah yes. Unknitting. I’ve gotten pretty good at it, sad to say.
10. Andres P. Nevarez | January 24th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
One Stitch is not something to go crazy about. lol! I just ignore or make it part of the pattern. Congratulations Anyway.
11. Autumn | February 7th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
That sounds like a total pain. I was knitting my first sweater and I was finishing up the back when I realised I had the wrong number of stitches. I counted and recounted and couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Finally I looked at the whole piece (thinking about maybe just going ahead and finishing) and found that I had dropped a stitch halfway down. So I had to frog it and reknit.
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