Ooops!

The thing about “TV knitting” is that it needs to be knitting you don’t have to pay much attention to.  Also, when you’re doing TV knitting, it’s a good idea to periodically check what you’ve done (like during the commercials) to catch any mistakes so you can fix them before you knit too far past them.  (I started this Hemmed Tobogan with Internal Ribbing last night, and knitted about 6 inches on it this evening while I was watching videos on YouTube.)

Apparently ribbing (k1, p1) requires too much thought.  I was catching up on Pure Living for Life’s homesteading videos on YouTube and wasn’t periodically  checking what I’d done, so I had already knitted about 20 rows past the mistake when I noticed it.

Rather than ripping the whole hat back 20 rows to where I made the mistake, I just ripped out the 7 stitches I needed to fix back one row beyond where I needed to fix them. Each one of those “threads” going across the gap is a row.

Then I got out my trusty double pointed needles (DPNs) and picked up the seven stitches I need to fix. DPN’s are perfect for this sort of job because you can’t turn your work, or your needle, and DPNs have a point on each end — that’s why they’re called double-pointed needles!

You have to carefully select the next thread up, and use that to knit the seven stitches you’re fixing.  You take it up a row at a time.  Yeah, it’s time consuming, but it’s less time consuming than ripping out 20 whole rows and reknitting them would be.

And there it is, all fixed. The knitting is a little uneven and the stitch along the edge of the “correction” is stretched out, but I’ll torque and twist the knitting to even it out.  Now I just have about three inches more to knit before I turn the hem. This is that Dazzle yarn in blue that the lady gifted to the knitting group from her mother’s estate.  That white bit at the bottom end is a length of cotton yarn I’m using for provisional cast-ons.  Let that be a lesson to me to frequently stop and inspect what I’ve knitted so far and catch any mistakes before I’ve knitted 20 rows past them!