I am a lazy knitter. Last night I noticed a tiny hole in the glove I’m making, where I’d accidentally picked up a stitch. To get back to where I’d made the mistake I’d have had to unravel an inch and a half of knitting, including totally undoing the thumb joining. I was thinking maybe I could just cover the hole when I wove in the ends, since it wasn’t that far from the thumb. This morning I had a better idea: I let that one stitch drop back, then picked it up again properly, this time twisting the picked-up stitch so no hole would be left. Then I laddered it back up to the current row, and did a k2tog there to get rid of the extra stitch.
One thing I like about knitting is that it’s so forgiving. People always write about how important gauge is, and it is, because if you have an extra stitch every 4″ / 10 cm, that’s 9 extra stitches on a size small, which could be anything from one to three inches. On the other hand, a lot of mistakes are fixable without ripping out and redoing, knitting stretches enough that a fit doesn’t usually have to be completely perfect, and an extra stitch added or substracted usually won’t make much difference. Also, quite a lot of mistakes will never be noticed by anyone but the knitter. There’s a famous quote from Elizabeth Zimmerman that “tight knitters lead a hard and anxious life”. I’d say the same about perfectionist knitters.
(EZ’s right, though – I’m knitting these gloves tightly because I want them to be wind-resistant, and it’s hard on my hands. I should have just gone down a needle size. Except that I don’t have size 3s here, though thanks to her at least I now know where I can order some.)
That’s what I used dp needles for~ About 35 years ago i started to knit a blanket for the baby I would have in a few months, and for someunknown reason I devised a checkerboard pattern of popcorn stitches and seed stitches — I think. (I must have been mightily bored, though how that could happen with two toddlers is strange…) I kept finding errors after I’d don a couple of inches, and it affected the checkerboard. So I’d drop ten stitches or so down to the error, pick them up on dp needles, and knit back up to the top. (Using dp’s meant I didn’t have to remember which was back and which was front.) I don’t have the blanket, but it exists — in front of my son’s fireplace. 😉
*smile* Morgan’s a tight knitter. And a perfectionist. And, yes, very anxious. I’m a perfectionist, but not a tight knitter. And not very anxious.