Basting: Thread Magic

Posted on July 8, 2014 by Tasha

I kind of feel sorry for anyone who doesn’t like basting, or thinks they don’t. It’s a like a magic wand for your sewing. It keeps things exactly in place for exactly as long as you need it, doesn’t distort your final sewing, doesn’t need to be removed as you go, and can be pulled out when you’re done, leaving no mark behind.

I fell in love with basting many moons ago, while sewing a collar onto a button-down shirt. I had all the layers of shirt and collar scrunched together ready to sew, and no matter how many pins I put in, the fabric kept shifting under the sewing machine as I went and getting terribly uneven, and/or folding over and catching pieces of the shirt I didn’t want in the seam. After ripping it all out and starting over two or three times, I decided to baste it in by hand and see if that was any better. Held by the basting, the shirt and collar seam went through the machine without a hitch, as nice as I could ask for, on the first try.

Basting just means any kind of temporary stitching, meant to hold fabric in place until you can get the final stitching done. The advantage is that the basting doesn’t have to be neat and even, or strong enough to hold up with wear, so you can concentrate just on the fabric while you’re basting, and then just on stitching when you’re sewing the final seam.

If I’m in a situation where I want basting, usually it’s because I need more precise control over the fabric, so I baste by hand. To baste, simply sew running stitches (illustrated at the top). The stitches can be pretty big and uneven—concentrate on the placement of the fabric layers with each stitch, rather than the stitches themselves. I like to begin and end with a backstitch, just to keep the basting from pulling apart until I’m done.

Some good places to use basting are: when you want things to align exactly (like matching stripes), when there are a lot of shifty layers (like the collar seam), or any other time when you want to make sure some part of your project will stay in place while you sew it. For the soft bra below, I knew there was no way the lace would stay in the folds I wanted against the fabric if it was held only by pins. Plus, basting allowed me to put everything together on my dress form, seeing exactly how the lace would work on a body, and then take the whole thing off the form and sew it.

It worked great! When you’re done with the final seam, you can remove the basting easily. Pick out the backstitches at the ends and grab one thread tail, then you can often pull out a long basting thread with one pull. Unless of course you sewed over it in the final stitching, but no worries, that happens. Just pull out what you can at once, you may have to cut and pick out a few small thread bits.

Although it may sound like a technique for more advanced sewing, I definitely recommend basting for beginners too. When you’re just starting out, learning how your machine handles fabric, especially in tricky situations, isn’t easy. You can baste practically anything that you just can not get to stay in place while sewing on the machine, get much better results, and save yourself a lot of frustration. According to The Mary Frances Sewing Book, back when most garments were sewn by hand, it was more efficient to baste a seam first, and then sew it, than to sew the final stitches while trying to keep the fabric layers in place.

Best of luck with your sewing!

In Which I Make a New Handle for a Plastic Gadget using Silicone Putty

Posted on March 21, 2014 by Tasha

When my friend Becca introduced me to the site The Grommet, the thing I immediately wanted was this moldable, air-curing silicone putty called sugru. It’s supposed to stick to practically anything, be formed into any shape, and be washable and permanent when cured. Their motto is “the future needs fixing”—how could I not love that?

I got some for my brother for Christmas, and kind of hoped he might give me one of the little packets to try myself, which he did. (Whether it’s nature or nurture, we definitely share a tendency to tinker and fix things.) “I don’t care what color,” I said. “Then you’re getting yellow,” he said.

I really didn’t care, because the thing I wanted to fix was this cheese grater. It came with a handle that rotated, but the plastic clips which held it on eventually broke, meaning that the handle just fell off, leaving me with nothing to grab onto but the sharp plastic shards on the end. Nevertheless, this is the kind of thing I can’t seem to get rid of, because all the other parts of it still work perfectly fine.

Working with the sugru is a lot like molding polymer clay, except it smells different. It will hold fine details like a fingerprint, or you can smooth the surface with a light touch. I could have spent a lot of time minutely sculpting it, but I tore myself away and mainly went for function here. The contents of one little package were plenty to form the handle. It cures up harder than I expected, more like the grips on my camera than like a silicone spatula.

The new handle is working well! It doesn’t rotate, but it makes the grater nice and comfortable to use again.

A product that lets consumers fix more things themselves—yes please! We need more of that.

(Full disclosure: I don’t have any connection to this product other than buying some, and I wasn’t compensated in any way for writing this post. However, if anyone wanted to send me some free sugru, I would not say no … )

How to Mend a Small Hole: Sewing a Patch by Hand

Posted on February 21, 2014 by Tasha

Here’s another way to fix a small hole in a shirt or a sweater—especially a hole that’s a little too big to simply sew back together without causing puckers. No sewing machine required though, it’s more invisible to sew a little patch like this by hand. These examples are in woven fabric, but this technique also works on knits. I sewed a patch like this on the front of this sweater, which because of the fuzzy knit fabric is too invisible for pictures!

I’m going to demonstrate on two skirts, which happen to both be made of linen, cut on the bias, and have small holes. The difference is, the blue one at the top I fixed for keeps—it had a little tear, but the rest of the fabric is still in good shape. I bought the pink stripey one for a dollar on the sale rack at St. Vinnie’s, and it followed me around the country on our summer travels for years. I even tried out two different ideas for adding pockets to bias skirts on it. By now it’s on its way out, the fabric across the back has a few tears, and is super thin and ready to tear in a lot more places. It’s ready to retire, but I can get one more use out if it by fixing one of the holes with bright green thread so you can see what’s going on.

To start, cut a circular patch, about three times as big across as your hole. Making it a little bigger will make the sewing easier, and you can trim it later. If you have a piece of the garment fabric, cut the patch from a section that matches up with where the hole is, in terms of color, pattern, or wear. If not, just try to find something that matches as well as possible. Hold the scrap behind the hole to see how it looks. If your fabric is very loosely woven, you may want to sew around the edges of the patch to keep it from unraveling. Otherwise, a circular patch should be ok as it is through normal wear and washing.

Click on any of the pictures to enlarge, you can see more detail here than I could while sewing the patches!

Carefully center the patch behind the hole. Match the grain (the direction of the grid of threads) of the garment and the patch. This is especially important if the garment is cut on the bias (with the grain at 45°) like this one, because I want to avoid changing the drape of the bias cut.

Pin the patch in place through the front of the garment, sticking each pin in and out of the fabric twice. Check to see that the patch is centered over the hole, and re-pin if necessary. If the fabric is slippery, it may be easier to sew a few temporary basting stitches, and pull them out when you’re done, than to get the pins to hold it.

Knot your thread, and bring it up from the back. Sew around the hole a couple of times, sewing through both layers using small backstitches. Don’t pull the stitches too tight, or the fabric will pucker up. Try to catch each thread that is cut by the hole on one pass or the other. If there are intact threads in the center of the hole, tack them down to the patch too.

The goal is to keep the hole from unraveling any further, without adding so many stitches that it makes the patch stand out.

When it’s done, secure the thread with another knot or a couple of backstitches just through the patch on the back.

Here’s the finished patch on the front:

And from the back. You can trim the patch, but leave some around the edges so that if it unravels slightly, there will still be enough fabric to hold it in place.

Here’s the back of the blue one:

Hopefully this adds another option to your mending toolkit!

Convertible Knitted and Felted Mittens

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Tasha

In which I remodel my mittens to make them better than ever, and show you how to calculate shrinkage when felting your knitting.

My friend Tom once commented that many of my clothes have stories behind them, and these mittens are no exception! In fact, I’m going to tone it down here, story-wise, and stick to only the most interesting and relevant of the many angles I could go for.

A Very Short History of the Original Mittens

I started knitting these as my take-along project on our trip to Italy in February of 2010. I knitted the main parts from yarns that we dyed the first time I ever did natural dyeing, with my grandmother and a bunch of dear family members in 2008. (I’m telling you, I’m skipping a lot of stories here). My goal was glove fingers for finer dexterity, that could also be covered by a mitten flip-top for extra warmth. Typically for me, I consulted a few patterns, but didn’t end up really using any of them. I didn’t have enough purple for the fingers and the flap, and because I love purple and green together (one of my favorite color combos for the hats) I decided to get green yarn. No one else was impressed with this decision, and I can now admit that one of my students at the time probably put it best when she said they looked like “dead fingers.” So, moving on, when I discovered that they were too slippery to drive in, I sewed on a bunch of patches from faux suede samples in different colors. Ignoring whether or not this made the green fingers look any better, and also the fact that all the fingers had come out too short after felting, I wore them all the time, all over the place, skiing, shoveling snow, etc., through last winter. By the end of that season, one of the fingers had developed a rather large (and cold) hole in the end.

A Plan for New and Improved Mittens

When I got them out this fall for the season, the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do more than just fix the hole. You see, if I was going to fix the hole, it made way more sense to knit on a little more finger, so that it would be actually the right length. And, it would be ridiculous to do that for only one finger. And, if I did it for the rest of the fingers, I would either have more green fingers or an even more ridiculous color mash-up than before. I decided to start over on the fingers, and this time, do the math.

As fate would have it, last winter I sent my blog friend Alessa some American patterns, and she sent me some yarn and other lovely stuff from Germany (these mittens really are more full of stories than average, even for me). Thanks Alessa! One skein of the yarn (on the left below) was a lovely variegated purple in 100% alpaca. Alpaca felts like a dream, and is just as soft felted as not. I saw it in my yarn bin and knew it would be perfect for new fingers.

Is that not the most-awesome-looking tin of chocolate?

How to Calculate Shrinkage for Felting Knitting

Lots of times I tell my students that knitting can either be all math; full of charts, calculations, and exact numbers of stitches, or no math at all; flowing along and decreasing when it looks right to you. In my mind, the happiest mix is somewhere in the middle. When you’re felting, it really helps to have a least a little math, which comes from making a sample in your intended yarn and measuring how much it shrinks, especially if you need it to come out a certain size. (I neglected to do this for the first fingers, and you saw how that went.)

I started out with a tighter gauge, then decided to increase my needle size, because looser knitting will felt faster (you can see from the before and after that it also affects the percentage of shrinkage). I’m using two strands of the yarn since it was fairly fine, and I wanted the fingers to be nice and thick and warm when finished. You don’t have to take a photo, but do measure and draw around your sample. Also make a note of how many stitches are in your sample, they will disappear into the felted texture and you won’t be able to tell later. (This is about the smallest sample that will give you an accurate idea.)

Before felting:

After felting: (As usual, click on the pictures to enlarge if you wish.)

Here’s the math part, it’s not too scary: divide the felted measurement by the unfelted measurement, to get the percent of the original measurement after shrinking. F/U = % I did this across my various measurements and got an average of 79% for the width, 84% for the height. I wanted both, because I had noticed when felting the fingers the first time that they wanted to shrink more in height than in width, no matter how I stretched them out, which meant that I had not added enough extra knitting in that dimension.

Now that you have your percentage, apply it like this (there was algebra involved but I did it for you): the unfelted measurement (the one you want so that you know how much to knit before it shrinks) equals the felted measurement (how big you want it to end up) divided by your percentage of shrinkage (.79 or .84 in my example). U = F/% Clear as mud? Try it, you’ll see what I mean. You end up with a number a bit bigger than the felted/finished number you put in. You can check it by putting it back in the first formula and see if you get the right percentage.

For my finished/felted measurements, I used the width of the previous fingers (by now chopped off), which I liked, and measured the height of my fingers sticking out of the mittens, adding a little extra for the thick knitted fabric to go over the top. I calculated the unfelted measurements, then used the gauge from my sample to figure out how many stitches to use for each finger. You can’t have a fraction of a stitch, so round up or down, whichever is closer or you want to err on the side of. I knit until each finger was about the calculated unfelted height, erring on the side of a bit extra at the top, which turned out to be a good idea!

Just in case, I made one finger as test (the index finger on the right below) and felted it before knitting the others. It came out great.

Even though the old fingers were felted on, I was able to snip the green stitches and pull them out, leaving the purple ones which I could pick up and knit from. It helped that the palms never got totally felted.

Other Improvements

The thumbs were too short as well, plus worn mostly through in one spot from gripping. And having only one layer of knitting (the part between the thumb and palm where the stitches tend to stretch open no less) meant that my thumbs were sometimes cold. I fixed all that. At this point, there was no stopping. Since the thumbs were somewhat loose, I decided to knit inner layers for them. I thought that I might need to slash the top of the mitten flap and extend it too, but after felting the fingers, it fit snugly over them, which would be warm, and I could add a bit of ribbing on the palm side for a little more length and to help hold the flap down. Neither of these new additions would be felted, and both were small, so this was the no-math part. I made adjustments visually, pulling something out if it didn’t seem right, and tried on the thumbs a lot to fit the shape to my hand.

This may be hard to believe, but according to my notes, the wool I used for the new ribbing is the same as the original flap and thumb! So it has definitely faded with sun and wear and washing. Fortunately I like both colors.

A Minor Miracle of Purple Suede

Finally, I needed something for grip on the fingers and palms. (I’m telling this story whole, it’s a good one.) I want to be able to drive and grab ski poles and my keys, etc., and I didn’t want to go back to the multicolored bits of Ultrasuede. I briefly considered using some light green suede elbow patches I got along with a sweater for recycling . . . and was fortunately dissuaded by friends. What I ideally wanted was something that would match the mittens.

Almost on a whim, I dropped into a rather old-school shop downtown, which sells saddles and leather and a few seemingly random bolts of blanket wool and skeins of rug yarn. I remembered that the last time I was there, over a decade ago, they had a bin of leather and suede scraps, and I thought if they still did, I might be able to find something close. I was the only one in the little shop, not too long before closing, and the woman working said that no, they didn’t have any scraps. I had the mittens with me, I showed her what I wanted to do. Suede and leather started at half a hide for $24, there were black and green and red . . . and at the end of the rack, four smaller, scrappier pieces, all in dusky, slightly mottled shades of purple. Not just purple, four distinct purples that each were so exactly what I needed that they looked like they were dyed to coordinate with the mittens, and left on the end of the rack by magic. “Oh,” she said, “You could use those! They’re $9 each. We sold all the red, all the black . . .” Hardly believing my good fortune, I picked the color I liked best out of the thicker two (two were quite thin), paid for it, and practically skipped down the street towards my car. A few times, when I’ve been intensely searching for a supply I cannot find, probably which doesn’t exist, I’ve dreamt that I went into a shop and found exactly that thing, only to wake up disappointed. This is the only time, so far, it’s ever happened in my waking life. I have a rather large piece of somewhat smelly purple suede left in my studio to prove it!

I love love love these mittens. I finished sewing on the suede over our family Thanksgiving trip, and just in time too, when we got back our town had a major cold snap, not getting above freezing at any time for over a week, unlike our usual mountain cold nights but mild days. I’ve worn these cross-country skiing, I wore them to art walk downtown at night (during the below-freezing week), shoveling snow, driving, and never one cold finger have I had! Felted alpaca is like little down blankets for your fingers. I can easily wriggle my fingers out of the mitten top for fine tasks without using the other hand. Having placed the suede patches where the wear was on the old fingers, plus the part of my palm that I use when I grip things—surprise!—they are in the perfect spots. I recommend the inside of the thumb especially.

If you want to make your own version, I’d start with a glove pattern you like. Either refer to a flip-top mitten pattern, or make up the flap as you go (Basically: I picked up sts across the back of the hand, cast on across the front and did a few rounds of short rows for a curved shape, joined everything into a round and knit, decreasing following the shape of the fingers underneath).

I realize that I haven’t talked about the actual felting, in fact that felting is probably the thing I know the most about that appears the least on this blog. Maybe I’ll do something about that in 2014.

In the meantime, if you have any questions about making mittens or felting in general, feel free to let me know!

Happy Solstice, everyone!

How to Fix a Coat with a Ripped Back Vent

Posted on October 30, 2013 by Tasha

I’ve had this coat for, um, more than a decade now, around 15 years I think (!) . . . I bought it for $5 at a garage sale at my dad’s church, when I was in High School. It was, without question, one of my best ever thrift finds. I wear it all winter, every winter, and I still get compliments on it all the time. I have fixed it so many times, in so many places, which really is the biggest key to its success over all this time, that and the quality fabric. The only clue I have to the coat’s true origins is a little tag inside which says “wolle.”

The other day, as I was finishing up teaching, I looked over at my coat hanging on the back of my chair, and the back vent was completely ripped out. It’s cold here now, especially at night, so this project jumped right to the head of my line.

Fixing the outside part is actually not too big a deal. Thanks to interfacing and the aforementioned quality fabric, the stitches have popped but the outside fabric isn’t torn (the lining is another matter which we’ll get to later).

(As always, click on any of the pictures to enlarge for a better look.)

I lined up the vent in its original position, twisting the coat around to get a good angle for sewing. I can tell where the stitching was by the little channel the thread has left in the fabric, and by the bits of leftover thread. I lined up these clues, pinned things in place, and started sewing, overlapping the place where the original seam is still intact.

I used a double thread and backstiches sewn by hand to replicate the old seam. I could have done at least some of this on the machine, but by the time I got the thread, stitch length etc. all sorted out, I figured this way was faster and easier.

As near as I can tell, those bits of thick white yarn are for matching a point in the original construction, and weren’t used to hold anything together. When this coat does finally give up the ghost, I think I’ll take it apart and see what else I can glean from how the inside is put together. I’d love to make my next winter coat from scratch.

Back to mending for now; keep following the path of the old vent stitching. It makes several right angles which seem random, but they were obviously holding everything in the right place before, so just go with it. I found that right at the turn it was useful to make another pass and add a few more backstitches. It can be hard to get them as dense as you would like and still get through the thick layers. Turn the coat right side out and see if everything is held in place the way you would like. If not, it’s easy to add more stitches.

So that’s actually about it, just keep backstitching until you get to the end of the old seam. Since that’s obviously a point of stress, I stitched in a little rectangle all around it to distribute the stress, rather than just following the path of the old thread.

Flip the coat right side out, and if you are satisfied with how the vent looks, it’s time to fix the lining.

Sigh, the lining. On the night that the coat vent busted, I described its lining to a sewing friend as “a hot mess” which pretty much sums it up. Whatever this (I’m guessing acetate) lining stuff is, it’s not nearly as nice or durable as the outside, so that at this point, particularly at areas which get lots of wear (like the vent, and where the sleeves join the coat body), it’s a patchwork of repairs reflecting the techniques, scraps of fabric, and even moods I’ve had over the past decade or so . . . at this stage my goal is just for it to hang together and not look too awful if someone happens to catch a glimpse of the inside.

Since the fabric itself is ripped here, I needed to patch it with something. I settled on a scrap of grey knit fabric, because 1. I won’t need to finish or turn over the edges, since it won’t ravel 2. The color is a pretty close match and 3. a knit is stretchy, which might work well at an area that’s clearly getting strain.

I sewed the first part of this patch on my machine, using a narrow zigzag stitch. It proved difficult to go around the top without everything bunching up under the machine foot, so I decided just sew the second side using backstitch again (but only one strand of thread this time).

After stitching to the top and burying the thread ends, I trimmed the patch for a neater (ha!) look, and there you have it. I also tacked the bottom of the lining piece to the outside fabric.

This has got me wondering about lining my fantasy next coat in a silk knit. What do you think? Could be pretty sweet . . .

Tada! Fixed. I just gave it a good press from the outside (a quick ironing with a lot of steam in the repaired part) and it’s good to go. Pay no attention to the other small hole, I didn’t even see it until I was editing the photos . . .

I bet after all that you might like to see a picture of me wearing this fabulous, recently fixed, coat, yes?

I know, it’s lovely, right? If you look closely, some of the repairs are more obvious. I’ve re-sewn the buttonholes multiple times, re-covered and attached I don’t know how many buttons, tacked down the tabs on the back belt every way I could think of, I put a bigger pocket in one side . . . but I’ve been more than paid back for time invested in repairs vs. time wearing coat. I think it has another season or maybe two left. The fabric right around the cuffs and front is starting to obviously wear. When it does go I may just copy it and make a few modifications. It occurred to me while working on this post that since this is my only real coat, I’d better make the new one while the weather is warm . . .

Here’s to extending the life of the things you love!

Repairing a Backpack

Posted on August 6, 2013 by Tasha

This spring, when I fixed this jacket for my dad, I got an unexpected bonus. Every time I saw him wearing it (which was quite often, it’s his favorite for cool windy days) my heart would warm with a soft fuzzy glow. Here was my dad, who I love dearly, so pleased with his jacket and so obviously getting good use out of it, both of those all the more so since I had fixed the zipper and the tearing pockets. It’s hard to describe actually— it seems at the same time obvious and silly— but I’m telling you, every single time I saw him in the jacket I would get a moment of happiness.

So, the obvious thing to do was to mend something else of his, and the standout candidate was this backpack. He’s had it since, I don’t know, around the time I was born maybe? And he still takes it out into the field on weekly basis. (Maybe I should explain that Dad is a fairly recently retired wildlife biologist, who now gets to spend more time outside with his pet projects than he did while he was working. Objects, which are part of his field gear and/or live in his pickup truck, do not lead an easy life.) And I have a serious soft spot for things that have far outlasted their expected usefulness—this clearly qualified.

Another (non-sentimental) reason I was all up for fixing rather than replacing this pack is that the zippers still work! I asked Dad if they did, and he said “kind of,” which turned out to mean that the only thing holding them back was the amount of frayed nylon threads stuck in the teeth. Amazing. The first thing I did was to turn under and sew down the raw edge of the flap covering the zipper, which had pulled out of its original stitching long ago and was the main source of the zipper-clogging threads. I pulled the threads from the zipper using my fingers, a tweezers, and a scissors for stubborn parts, alternately zipping and unzipping it until they were just about all gone. I also went kind of nuts zigzagging over any and all seam allowances and raw edges I could reach inside the pack with my machine, trying to keep future fraying and loose threads to an absolute minimum, since after all, this backpack has to be ready for another 30-odd years of use.

The bigger holes I patched inside and out, to reinforce them, and again to keep all raw edges inside so they wouldn’t unravel any further. The worst hole was where one strap had pulled out of the body of the pack. That one had allowed Dad’s not-so-small camera to fall out of the pack—that was the last straw for him to hand it over so I could fix it. After patching that hole on both sides, I sewed a big X through the strap webbing and the new fabric, which ought to hold it. I also reinforced the other strap with similar stitching.

The only part I have a doubt about, is where one strap had pulled off at the point where it’s anchored to the top of the pack. I added new fabric on both sides of the whole area where the straps attach (the one you see on the outside is black faux suede), and stitched around the whole thing as best I could. But, there is an old rivet in there that had pulled out. I couldn’t stitch as close to it as I would like, and I thought pulling it off completely would weaken the strap too much. At least I will be around to see how it holds up, and make future repairs if necessary!

Hopefully you don’t need any more encouragement than the above story to get out there and fix something for someone you love. It doesn’t have to be sewing, use whatever skills you have. And if you have any questions about needle-and-thread mending, let me know, I’ll be happy to help if I can.

Update: How to Fix a Small Hole in Knit Fabric

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Tasha

When I published this post about fixing small holes in sweaters and other knit clothes, I realized I didn’t really have pictures of repairing a hole in the middle of the fabric, not near a seam, and I said I’d add some if the opportunity came up.

Well, it did. One of the lovely things when word gets out that you work with a certain material (in this case recycled cashmere garments) is that every now and then, someone just gives you some. The best thing about this as far as I’m concerned, better than the free stuff, is that I have absolutely no obligation to use the donated items for business purposes unless I want to. Therefore, when someone gives me not-yet-felted cashmere sleep pants (thank you thank you Lauren!) I get to yell “Cashmere SLEEP PANTS!” try them on immediately, and wear them myself!

They also had one small hole, a perfect example to fix. It was perfect but, um, fuzzy and a little hard to see (who’d have thought, right, fuzzy cashmere?) so I also snipped a hole in my sample from the how to pick up a dropped stitch in knitting post, fixed it, and included those pictures as well. Click on the link above to see the updated post.

Here’s to enjoying the materials life gives you! And happy mending!

How to Pick Up a Dropped Stitch in Knitting

Posted on December 14, 2012 by Tasha

dropped stitch drawing 1

I wanted to show you how to fix hole in a sweater (or other knitted article) and as I started putting words and pictures with how I do it, it became more and more obvious that knowing this first would be extremely helpful. So, even if you don’t knit, keep reading . . .

A “dropped” stitch is one that falls off a knitting needle, or the thread above it breaks (like a run in stockings) so that it becomes disentangled from the stitch above it.

Knitting is just pulling loops through loops. When one loop pops out of the loop below it, it releases into a long loose bar, and can easily cause a chain reaction. But please do not panic, it’s almost as easy to pick those loops up again as it was for them to pop out in first place.

If more than one column of stitches is coming undone, first find the last/uppermost intact loop of each column and stick something (like a safety pin or a piece of yarn) though it, to keep that column from unraveling any further while you work on the others.

dropped stitch drawing 2

To pick up a stitch, get a crochet hook (mine is tiny – I found it in a heat vent in an apartment we rented in Madison, and it’s been in my knitting bag ever since – a little bigger one will probably be easier to work with). Stick the hook through the last intact loop, grab the bar above that loop with the hook, and pull the bar through the loop. It will form a new loop. Ta da! I think it’s easiest (and doesn’t cause twisted stitches) to have the hook facing down, grab each bar from above and pull it straight through. This does mean you’ll need to take the hook out and stick it straight through the new loop to pick up another bar, if your stitch has dropped more than one row.

dropped stitch drawing 3

One refinement; knit stitches are loops pulled toward you, and purl stitches are loops pulled away from you. So, to pick up a knit stitch, have the bar behind the old loop, and pull it toward you. To pick up a purl, put the bar in front of the old loop, insert the hook from the back, and pull the bar away from you to make a new loop, as shown above. That’s it! Not only can you now pick up stitches, if you’re paying attention you’ll understand the fundamental structure of knitting, and the difference between knit and purl stitches. Pretty cool, eh?

If you’re working with a bigger area of dropped stitches, pick up one column at a time by making a new loop from each bar, making sure to pick up the bars in their natural order. Move them around with your finger and check which ones connect to the adjacent stitches where to make sure. The two pictures above show picking up one column of purl stitches. When you get to the top of a column, put the last loop back on whichever needle is convenient to continue working, you can rearrange them when you’re done. Make sure that the loop is sitting on the needle the same way as the other ones which did not fall off – flip it the other way and check if you aren’t sure.

Move to the next column if there is one, and pick up the bars in order again, until all the top loops are sitting on the needles again. Look to see where the yarn you are working with is coming from, this is always the last stitch you knit. You may need to pass stitches which haven’t been knit on this row yet back to the left needle to get them ready to work. Remember to pass them with the needles tip to tip, which won’t twist the stitches. And we’re done!

Now that dropping stitches and picking them up is not so scary, we come to the second great thing about knowing this: you can do it on purpose to fix other mistakes. Say you look back and realize that three or four rows previous to where you are now, you knit a stitch when you should have purled it in your pattern. Instead of ripping out all the stitches you’ve done since then, you can just drop the stitch directly above the mistake, and let it ladder down as far as you need. Then, you can pick up each stitch as a knit or a purl, whatever you need to make your pattern right – and your mistake is fixed!

I was mostly done with the photos for this post, and wondering if they were clear enough, when I remembered that I already had drawings, scanned in and ready to go, from the handouts I make for in-person classes – a good thing!

If you have questions about this, or another topic you’d like to see featured here, just let me know. Happy making!

Tasha Miller Griffith

Sustainability and Belonging through Textiles

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