Transcript
All right. So, it happens to all of us. You’re knitting along, you’re having a great time, you’re talking to your friends and all of the sudden you realize you have dropped a stitch a couple of rows below. Didn’t realize it. Or maybe you’re coming along to a stitch and all of a sudden it drops and it falls all the way down just like a run in your stockings. Because that’s basically what it is. When you have a run in stockings, you get this ladder going down your leg and when you drop a loop down, it creates ladders above the loop and what those ladders are are just stitches that have come out of their looped form, because they have nothing to hold them there.
So here’s my little dropped stitch down here. I’m going to show you one technique on how to pick it up with a crochet hook, which is fast and easy.
So try to find the loop wherever it maybe hanging out, and you’re going to insert the crochet hook into the loop from front to back. And now you’re going to use the hooked part of the crochet hook to go under the first ladder, that is the ladder that’s closest to the loop itself. And then you’re going to use that hook to pull the ladder through the loop. And there’s one row of knitting saved. You’re going to do it again. Take the head of the crochet hook under the ladder, and pull it through the loop, making loops coming up through loops, which is what we do in when we’re knitting except these loops have fallen all the way down.
So repeat that as many rows as you need to until you get the loop all the way up to where it needs to be and then you’re going to put it on to the left hand needle and make sure that you mount it with the right side of the loop in front, not the left side of the loop in front. That’s something that happens a lot when we pick up dropped stitches, is we sort of get them mounted incorrectly. And then give your fabric a little tug to even things out. Then you knit it as normal.
But that’s also a way to fix a mistake. If you have a mistake down here that you want to fix, you can on purpose ladder down, which means undoing that knit. You can drop the stitch all the way down until you get to the mistake and then you can fix it by picking back up again.
But that’s just how to do it in stockinet. What if you have a drop stitch in garter? So here’s a garter stitch sample and I’m going to drop this stitch. So on garter stitch we’re going to need to go in from a couple of different directions. I’m going to drop a few down here. So I’m going to catch my stitch and if I ladder all the way back up, the way I did in stockinet knit, I would have a column of only knit stitches running all the way up in the middle of my garter stitch, which is not what I want.
So we’re going to have to be smart and alternate. I just picked up one from this side that was in the right in the direction and now I need to sort of reverse things and go to the other side of my knitting and try not to lose that loop. There’s my loop and I’m going to pick one up from this side, grab the ladder and pull one up. Then I’m going to go back to the other side, find my loop and grab one from this side. Go back to the other side. We’re just turning. Grab my loop from this side and now I’ve managed to ladder back up in garter stitch, which is basically a knit and a purl, a knit and a purl, a knit and a purl. I can put it back in my needle, making sure that this stitch in mounted correctly, with the right leg in front and I can continue on.
So that’s how to pick up a dropped stitched or to drop a stitch on purpose to ladder down to fix a mistake.
