It’s been another busy week as more people are working on hand knitted projects for their families. It certainly seems like there will be a lot of warm fuzzy gift giving this year.
One sad part of knitting is that you will occasionally drop a stitch and continue on or you misread the pattern and make an error. Sometimes people start having problems in the next row and they stop. Sometimes a novice knitter will continue on for many rows, either unaware that there is a problem or unable to believe that they aren’t following the pattern exactly, even though it doesn’t look or feel right.
That’s when they come to see me and say the pattern is wrong. Usually, the pattern isn’t wrong! Unpicking is not only a part of knitting, its an important part – and its not always easy. At the end of unpicking, you have to have all the stitches identified exactly and set on the needles correctly or you’re going to end up with another problem.
The hardest thing, when I do it, is to see their faces, as I pull undone hours of effort. But its alwayw worth it because a perfectly finished item is 100 times better than one with a flaw that you could have fixed with 5 minutes of creative unpicking.
Unpicking is a fact of life – its not always pleasant, but its always going to be with us.