Everybody does it – when you first start out knitting, you find yourself gaining stitches, losing stitches, or finding holes in your knitting. Well, today we’re going to troubleshoot your knitting, and find out how to fix the three most common knitting problems.
1. I have more stitches that I started with!
There are three common causes for this – not dropping stitches off the left hand needle, splitting yarn, and starting a row with the yarn on the wrong side.You may also be accidentally wrapping your yarn around your needle mid-row… see part 3 for how to remedy that!
Knitting into the wrong side of the stitch, creating an accidental yarn-over
Are you gaining several stitches in a row? Then it’s probably either your yarn, or you aren’t dropping stitches when they’ve been knit. Some yarns – and it has nothing to do with price – are notoriously ‘splitty’. As you knit, the ‘plies’ (the strands that make up the yarn) come untwisted a little, and you can end up splitting a stitch in half, knitting both halves and effectively making 2 stitches where there was just one. Do some of your stitches seem to be a lot thinner than others? Watch out for these thin stitches and make sure it isn’t half a stitch! Switch yarn brands, to one more tightly spun, if this is a problem. It doesn’t have to be a more expensive brand – even some high-end yarns can be horribly splitty sometimes!
Carrying yarn over the needle makes one stitch look like two
When you start learning a new skill, you have to concentrate on the movements involved until you’ve had enough practice for them to become automatic. When you first start knitting, it can be hard to remember every single move, and you end up not dropping stitches off the needle once they’ve been knit. This means you end up knitting the same stitch twice, and again gaining stitches. A mnemonic may be useful until the movements become automatic. Try chanting ‘down the hole, around the back, through the loop, and off jumps Jack!‘ as you make each stitch. You may feel like a bit of an idiot, but you won’t have to use it long before those four movements are etched into your brain!
If you’re gaining extra stitches one per row or less, chances are when you start a row you are taking the yarn to the other side by passing it over the needle rather than under. As you can see from the photo, when you do this the last stitch is pulled across the needle, making it look like two stitches – so you knit both. Check at the start of each row that the first two stitches aren’t really one – and remember to bring your yarn across under, not over, the needle.
2. I have fewer stitches than I started with!
The problem may be your yarn – if you are beginning to knit with either a very fine yarn, or a very fuzzy one (or worse, both – fingering-weight mohair is not a good yarn to learn on!) then you might sometimes be knitting two stitches instead of one. The best solution is simply try another yarn – but if you have your heart set on that one, count stitches regularly and keep a close eye on how thick each stitch seems as you knit it!
More commonly, you may be dropping stitches – they can easily slip off if you put your knitting down in a hurry or if you’re struggling with a fiddly bit! Look at your knitting – do you see any little rows of holes like ladders in a stocking? That’s the sign of a dropped stitch. Luckily, there is a quick and easy way to pick up dropped stitches with a crochet hook. Find the bottom of the ‘ladder’ and catch that stitch up with a hook coming from the front of the work. Catch the next rung of the ladder and use the crochet hook to pull it through the bottom stitch you just caught. Pull the next rung through that one, and so on until you get to your needle – slip the stitch back onto the needle. If you’re knitting in garter stitch, this gets a bit more fiddly as you have to alternate sides (to make sure the ‘v’s and bumps are on the right sides), but the principle is the same.
3. My knitting is full of holes!
What kind of holes? If they are ladder-like rows of holes, then you have dropped a stitch, and you can fix it as described above.
If they are just random single holes, then they are caused either by twisted stitches, or by accidental yarn-overs. If you have a largish hole and an extra stitch, then you may have wrapped your yarn around the needle by mistake. We do use yarn-overs sometimes to make eyelets and lace patterns. You can fix this by finding the stitch directly above the hole, and dropping it. Let it run all the way down to the hole, where it will stop. You might need a little jiggery-pokery with a crochet hook or tapestry needle to ease some of the slack into neighbouring stitches and get rid of the ladder.
Knitting into the back of the stitch
If you have a small hole and the stitch next to the hole seems to be pulled to one side, then you probably have a twisted stitch. Look at the stitches on the needle – they can be thought of as having a front ‘leg’ and a back ‘leg’. When you knit normally, you knit into the front leg of the stitch, and the stitches lie flat, looking like inverted Us. If you knit into the back leg, it twists the stitch, making it look like a lowercase e, which takes up less space as well as pulling the stitch to one side, creating a hole. Find the stitch directly above the twisted stitch and drop it off the needle. Let it unravel until it reaches the twisted stitch. Untwist the stitch, and repair with a crochet hook as you would for a dropped stitch.
I hope this has been helpful! Back to our beginner pattern tomorrow 
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