How to Frog Your Work

"Frogging" is the craft-community term for ripping out your work — as in, "rip it, rip it," which sounds enough like a frog's croak to have stuck. Here's how to do it without losing more than you have to.

Frogging vs. tinking

For small errors just a stitch or two back, "tinking" (knit spelled backward) — undoing stitches one at a time in reverse — is usually faster and safer than frogging a whole section. Save frogging for mistakes far enough back, or serious enough, that undoing stitch-by-stitch would take longer than starting the section over.

How to frog knitting

Take your work off the needles entirely, or slide it off a section at a time.
Pull the working yarn steadily to unravel back past the point of the mistake, plus a couple of extra rows for a clean, even edge to restart from.
To get live stitches back on a needle, use a needle a size or two smaller than your working needle and pick up each stitch as you reach the last clean row, going slowly to avoid splitting the yarn.
Once every stitch is back on the needle and you've confirmed your stitch count is correct, switch back to your working needle size and continue.

How to frog crochet

Crochet is generally easier to frog than knitting — pulling the working yarn unravels a chain or row of stitches cleanly without needing to catch live loops the way knitting does. Pull back to a clean stitch, insert your hook into the last stitch you want to keep, and continue from there.

Before you frog

Frogging heavily textured stitches (like bobbles, popcorns, or brioche) can leave yarn more crimped and less even than a smooth stitch would — a gentle steam or wash before reusing the yarn helps it relax back out.
If a huge section needs to come out, consider snipping the yarn just past the mistake and pulling the tail out separately, rather than unraveling the entire working ball back through the piece.
It's genuinely fine to just... not frog. Many mistakes only bother the person who made them.