Mistakes 101: Stitches Facing the Wrong Way on the Needle

Hi guys, Mary Beth Temple here for The Knitting Circle. A really common mistake that people find themselves making, is they have reknit, or unknit, or change the orientation somehow of a stitch, and then the stitch is facing the wrong way on the needle. There's a couple of really easy ways to fix that, and I'm going to show them to you right now. The first question of course, is, "How can I tell if my stitches are the wrong way on the needle?" Because if I'm holding my needle like this, and I'm getting ready to knit my next row, it looks fine, right? I can't tell that there's anything wrong with that. The thing that you need to be aware of is this. So, here is a stitch, I'm going to pop it off the needle so you can see what I'm talking about. Here is a stitch, and each stitch has two legs. That's one leg, and that's the other leg. I guess we refer to legs as either side of the loop. So, that is for right-handed knitters, that's my left leg, and that is my right leg. If I'm knitting plain old stockinette, I always want the right leg of the stitch to be in front of the needle, and the left leg behind. So, I'm knitting, and I'm knitting, and I'm cruising on away, and I get here, and this doesn't look quite right. This frequently happens when you've made a mistake, or you need to recalibrate the previous row, and you pop stitches off the needle to reknit something, or replace something. It can also happen if you drop a bunch of stitches, and you don't get them quite back on the needle the way they belong when you're picking up. So, you have a couple of options here. So, here we are, my right leg is behind the needle, and I know I don't want that. So, the first thing I can do is just change its orientation, simple as that, and then knit it like I normally would. Alternatively, instead of taking it off the needle, and switching it, I can just knit my stitch through the back leg, and then it lays nice, see? So, I'm cruising along, and I'm cruising along, oops. So, what happens if I get to this stitch, and I don't notice that it's facing the wrong way, and I go ahead and knit it? First off you feel how, well, you can't feel it, can you see how tight that is? I really had to work to get my needle in there. What's going to happen is the legs are going to be crossed. Let me just do the one after it, so you can see what I'm talking about. So, let's look really close. We have uncrossed legs, uncrossed legs crossed, crossed or twisted legs, and that's what happens when you don't have it on the needle correctly, and you don't notice, and you go ahead and knit it the way it faces. I'm going to go ahead and undo those two stitches, or tink which is knit spelled backwards, which is how we do that. Now, you notice when I unknit that, it's still wrong because that's how I knit it. So once again, I can either twist it so that it is in the correct orientation, or if I hadn't, I know I'm messing with it, if I hadn't fixed it, I could've just go ahead, I could just go ahead and knit in the back loop, and that would keep the legs uncrossed. The other time this happens, if you get distracted and, oop, see? That one's twisted. I'm going to knit in the back. If the phone rings, or the kid cries, or the dog pulls, and a lot of times, if that happens, well I don't want to say a lot of times. The other time that can happen is if you're putting your work away, or you're carrying it around in your tote bag, and you accidentally pull out the whole needle, and then you're frantically trying to pick those stitches up, and get them back on the needle. In that case, you just want them back on the needle, you don't care which way they're facing. So, you want to make sure that when you are, the knitting the row after that, you can make sure that you knit each stitch the way it wants to be. Now, there are stitches that will tell you to knit through the back loop specifically. There are stitches in which that twist is a feature, not a bug, but for this video, for this project, I want to make sure that all my stockinette stitches are all lined up the face, and facing the same way, and don't have their little legs crossed. So, if you make a mistake on your knitting, and you fix it, and you wind up with a stitch facing the wrong way, choose the method to fix that, that works best for you. I'm Mary Beth Temple for The Knitting Circle. Thanks for joining us.