Fixing Knitting Mistakes by Laddering Down
You know that moment when you look down at your knitting and realize it doesn’t look right? It sucks. It’s terrifying. It’s frustrating. It makes you question what kind of knitter you are – will you rip the whole thing back? Will you accept the mistake and keep moving on? Or – how could you have been so stupid as to make that mistake? This usually happens when I’m talking too much and not paying enough attention to my knitting. Case in point: when I made this error in my Hot and Bothered Cable Dress I was at knit night.
Often when I find a mistake, especially far down in my work, I abandon the project in time out for an extended period of time. I hate frogging large parts of work, mostly because putting so many stitches back on needles is so painful. Yarn can split, stitches twist (see my tutorial on fixing twisted stitches), or the yarn may not frog nicely and it could end up looking worse.
Thanks to our amazing knitting community when I posted my dilemma in my Instagram stories I got responses telling me to just rip back the cable, frogging everything wasn’t necessary! So I did a search on YouTube and found a video by Roxanne Richardson that explained everything perfectly.
Aside from the general steps on how to do this fix, called Laddering Down, Roxanne included so many little details for setting things up so you could be successful. Things like keeping your non-working yarn strands out of the way with a locking stitch marker, making sure you are using the correct strand, how to fix tension after the stitches are repaired, and even how to knit continental!
I know this looks incredibly scary and if you don’t normally knit continental that sounds even scarier. But the actual fixing and knitting continental is surprisingly simple. The hardest part is making sure you ladder down to the right spot, especially with cables. And it did take me 2 tries to ladder down to the right place. Since I only had to rip out 9 stitches, having to try again felt much easier than if everything had been ripped out. I’m also lucky that this Knit Picks yarn (affiliate link) frogs incredibly well.
I am using 6.5 mm needles to knit this piece so I tried initially to use 3.5 mm needles for doing the fix as it is strongly recommended to use smaller needles so that the last stitch in every row can be knit. I found that these were too small, leaving a lot of yarn left over after I had knit my 9 stitches, meaning more wiggling was required to fix the tension afterwards. So I switched to 5 mm needles and these worked really well. The only thing that could be better would be to use wooden needles so things don’t get too slippery.
The best part is that this isn’t just to fix cable mistakes. You can ladder down to fix almost any mistake! I got so many messages after I showed my fixed dress that I figured I should have a place to easily share how I learned to do the fix! Now I highly recommend just not making mistakes, but if you do, hopefully this video can help you! The link is below!
Knitting SOS – Laddering Down to Correct Errors from Roxanne Richardson
And this video was so good I would bet others could help you learn almost anything in knitting! In general, any question that comes up in your knitting I highly recommend consulting YouTube. There are so many people that have great tutorials to teach you how to do a skill or how to fix something! Knitting is a pretty visual art, so in most cases it’s difficult to describe things, so being able to see these videos can make all the difference!
