To Knit or Un-Knit!

Good Morning!

It's another cloudy and soon to be rainy day here in New York. Our laws are lush with green and mushrooms.  Wish we could share the wealth with some of our drier states.

Yesterday I had mentioned that I had taken a class this past Saturday.  Always a fun thing to do if you can attend one, not only for the learning in the class, but all the great tips that you can glean from other knitters.

I have been knitting for a very long time and I picked up two knitting terms that just hit my funny bone. They are perfectly descriptive and relevant and whoever came up with them must have an extremely creative mind.

The first one involves ribbing.  SSHH!  If you know the answer to this please don't tell!  Anyway, there are so many ribbing styles:

• 1 X 1
• 2 X 2
• Twisted
• 3 X 3
• And on and on, almost as many as you can imagine

The word of the day was "Frogging." Yep!  "Frogging" ----> Ribbing ----> "Ribbit!  Ribbit!"  Okay, maybe it wasn't that funny, but my morning class had a good laugh.  Guess we were still tired.

The next one is relevant to ripping. I know that every one of us rips, some more than others, but just the same, we all do it. There is an up side to ripping that I must share because it sometimes helps to know that there is a positive result from the negative. If you look at ripping, or un-knitting, as a learning tool, especially as a newer knitter, it may take some of the frustration away.

I define ripping as taking your knitting off the needle, pulling out the offending rows and then picking up the live stitches again.  These are a few techniques one can learn from ripping:

• Above all, this teaches Bravery!
• You also learn how to pick up the loose stitches, and get them back on the needle.
• There might also be a few stitches that come un-done which will have to be worked back up again.
• And then there are the twisted stitches.  My main focus when picking up stitches is to get them on the needle.  That means that some of them are straight and some twisted.  Learning the difference between the two comes easily this way, believe it or not.

The other type of ripping, is un-knitting.  This method un-knits one stitch at a time, and is mostly used when you only have a few stitches to undo.  Sometimes it is also used when working a more complicated pattern and need to keep more careful track as you "back up."

What is knit backward?  TINK!  So...now when you have to rip or un-knit, you can use the term TINK!

Have fun with your Frogging and Tinking!