10:
Dropped Stitches
This is the chapter that I knew had to be in this book, but kept
avoiding because I couldn’t get my thoughts around how to explain
what to do without some difficult mental acrobatics. (My mind and I
are not at all sporty.) I finally had to attack the concept because
I phoned my daughter, living in New York, and was astounded to hear
that she had started knitting a shawl. In fact, when she answered
the phone, she told me to wait a moment, she was finishing a row. I
thought I had the wrong number!
My daughter was the only child who didn’t finish a sweater when her
teacher arranged for me to give the class a series of knitting
lessons. I still have the piece of knitting she produced so
painfully all those years ago. Although I consider her a genius in
many ways, she certainly didn’t show any aptitude for knitting.
So there she was, half a world away, asking me to tell her how to
fix DROPPED STITCHES!
Hold on. Here we go!
---
Look at the construction of a bit of
knitting. Worked in rows, stitches are linked horizontally and
vertically to each other to form the fabric [pic 1].
1: Stitches, whether knit or purl, link in four different
directions. When you pick up a dropped stitch, you have to
re-establish the sequence.
If you drop a stitch, it breaks the sequence
of the knitting and so you will need to know, first of all, how to
find the dropped stitch and then what to do about it.
---
Detective work: finding the dropped
stitch
Dropped stitches hide!
If you count every few rows as you knit, you will quickly notice if
you have dropped a stitch. Counting regularly is much easier than
unpicking miles of stitches to get back to a hole. If you haven’t
been counting, you don’t see it happen, but you eventually realise
that you are knitting less stitches than when you started. Sometimes
there are quite a few dropped stitches, and the knitting is starting
to become a triangle [pic 2].
2: There are three almost invisible dropped stitches here,
and this piece is well on the way to becoming a triangle!
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