I have been knitting. There is no regular crochet on the hooks. The double-ended crochet and spinning are forgotten. My handspun alpaca yarn is languishing. I am knitting a sock and if things continue to go this well, I will knit a second one!

This is my second sock to get this far. When it gets finished, it will be my first complete sock. Knitting the toe was still a struggle although much easier this second time around. Even better, the toe fits and isn’t lumpy. Stockinette in the round has suddenly become easy and it’s starting to get faster. The sock feels good. It fits. The stitches feel good. The fabric feels good. I’m enjoying knitting.

I said the toe was a struggle. “The toe gave me fits” might be a better statement. I found myself purling the knit rows on several occasions – and catching the error two rows later. I managed to rip the erroneous stitches without having to frog the whole sock – I think I may have figured out how to pick up stitches when ripping. In the past, if I’ve had to rip more than about five stitches, I have generally ended up frogging the entire item and starting over. Working to within five stitches of perfection is extremely limiting with respect to the size of finished objects one can produce.

I’m starting to wish that knitting books and tutorials spent more time on dealing with mistakes. The simple statement, “rip it back and repair it” is not nearly so simple as it seems, but most of what I’ve seen goes no deeper. (The wonderful and very in depth Yarn Harlot repair method described here and here is still beyond my skill fear level.) I’ve been needing to know how to rip my work back without making the situation worse. Figuring out how to fix my errors is very empowering. I have a long way to go before my knitting skills catch up with my crochet skills, but I think I’ve just overcome the biggest impediment.

If you are reading this in hopes of learning how to rip back and repair you work without destroying the entire object, my big epiphany was to grab a spare needle and stick it in the loop before pulling the stitch out of the loop. Said differently, the stitch you are about to rip is holding the stitch (loop) beneath it and preventing that loop from vanishing as well. If you stick a spare needle – doesn’t have to be the proper size, just has to be something – in the loop you don’t want to ravel before you pull the loop you do want to ravel, then the stitch is protected and you can recover. If you just yank on that string, all is lost! In this sense, I have found knitting to be very different from crochet. In knitting, ripping by pulling the string exposes a great many stitches. Each and every one of these stitches must be picked up to resume progress on the item. If any one of them rips further, additional ripping or mending is necessary and all hope of progress is likely lost. In crochet, however, there is never more than one vulnerable loop and one can resume work by picking up this single loop.

Having figured out how to repair my mistakes, I am now making rapid progress on my sock.