Picking up a Dropped Stitch

Video Transcript

"Hi, I’m Kelsey. I’ve been knitting for 10 years and am a member of several knitting organizations. Hopefully if you’ve been following all these video instructions, you’re knitting like a pro, but occasionally mistakes happen and its good to know how to fix them. One of the most common mistakes is called a drop stitch. This happens when as you’re knitting a stitch somehow falls off the needle like this where it comes loose and then unravels. This can happen sometimes without you knowing. Until suddenly you look and you’ve got something like this, a bit of a hole and then a ladder where you can see the stitch down there. Often times when you’ve done this you don’t realize till you’re several stitches away or several rows up. What you want to do is go back and get to that place there. You could knit across and pearl back till you’re there, but it’s better to try to fix it right away. You want to do something that’s called unknitting or sometimes tinking, which is knit backwards. You’re going to actually unknit them and go backwards. What you want to do is take your left needle and have that left needle claim the stitch back. You’re going to stick the left needle back into the stitch below the right hand stitch, into that loop there, and pull the right hand stitch off and pull it out. Stick it in that loop below, pull the stitch out and pull it off. Keep doing that until you get to the spot where the dropped stitch should be. Now I’ve gotten to it here. Ideally that loop should be up here on this left hand needle. So what I do is take my trusty crochet hook that I got when I was talking about tools, and I’m going to stick it into that loop that’s fallen so I now have it onto the crochet hook. You have this ladder if you’ve dropped the stitch. What you’re going to do is now, once you get that dropped stitch onto that crochet hook, grab each rung of the ladder and pull it through the loop, making a new loop. Keep going, grab the rung of the ladder and pull it through the loop. Now, if you look, I’ve basically recreated that whole column of stitches right there. Now I’m just going to go ahead and slide that right back onto my left hand needle. And now its good as new, and I can go along knitting as before with a brand new fixed garment. That is how you pick up a dropped stitch. "