Fixing Common Mistakes
Every knitter and crocheter drops a stitch eventually. Most of the fabric-threatening moments have a calm, well-established fix — here are the ones that come up most often.
Dropped stitch (knitting)
- Stop as soon as you notice — a dropped stitch that's run down several rows is much easier to fix than one that's kept unraveling.
- Insert a crochet hook, from front to back, through the live loop of the dropped stitch.
- Hook the horizontal strand of the row directly above it and pull it through the loop on your hook, forming a new stitch.
- Repeat up through each unraveled rung of the "ladder" until you reach your current row, then place the stitch back onto your needle in the correct orientation.
Twisted stitch
A stitch that's mounted backward on the needle (the leading leg behind the needle instead of in front) will look slightly twisted once knit. Drop back down to that stitch, let it unravel to a single loop, then use a crochet hook to re-knit it back up to your current row, making sure it sits on the needle with its leading leg in front this time.
Extra or missing stitch (knitting)
Count your stitches regularly against the pattern's expected count rather than waiting for the fabric to look visibly wrong. An extra stitch is often an accidental yarn over; a missing one is often two stitches accidentally knit together. Both are easiest to fix by dropping back to the error and reworking forward, rather than trying to hide the discrepancy going forward.
Skipped stitch or miscounted turning chain (crochet)
If your row count is creeping wider or narrower, the usual culprits are a skipped stitch at the start or end of a row, or inconsistency in whether the turning chain counts as a stitch. Count your stitches at the end of every row for the first several rows of a new project until you trust your rhythm.
Running out of yarn mid-row
Join new yarn at the start of a row whenever possible rather than mid-row, so the join lands at a seam or edge instead of the middle of visible fabric. If you must join mid-row, leave several inches of tail on both the old and new yarn and weave them in along the same path the stitches take, so the join is invisibly locked into the fabric's structure rather than just tied off.