I feel like if you knit long enough you’ll make every possible mistake that a knitter can make. And while it might feel like no one possibly could have done that same boneheaded thing you just did, I can guarantee you someone has done it before. And probably someone else has done it and written a blog post or made a video to show you how to fix it.
I don’t exactly remember how I managed to drop a cast on stitch, but I’m sure I was just pushing the stitches too far too fast on my needles and one of them fell off. I know it’s happened more than once.
If your cast on isn’t that long it’s not a huge deal to just rip it out and start over, but if your cast on is vast (especially if you’ve already knit most of your first row, too) you probably don’t want to use that option.
Patty Lyons is coming to out rescue, as she so often does, with a post over at Modern Daily Knitting explaining exactly how to pick up a cast on stitch you’ve dropped. This method works for a long tail cast on, which I feel like is what most people do most of the time so it should be pretty helpful to know this method.
Taking the time to understand what’s happening in a cast on or when working different stitches is super important to building your confidence as a knitter and a fixer of mistakes, because when you know what the yarn is doing it’s a lot easier to re-create that when you need to fix a mistake. And of course the closer we can get to what would be happening to the yarn if we were knitting normally, the less obvious the fix is going to be.
In this case if you take your time to do it right, it won’t be visible at all. How great is that?
[Photo via Modern Daily Knitting.]
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