Picking Up a Dropped Stitch in Garter Stitch

Hi guys, and welcome back to the Knitting Circle. I'm Mary Beth Temple. All of us drop stitches. It happens. And sometimes you notice the minute you did it and sometimes you get a couple of rows past and then you notice. So I'm going to show you a couple of different ways to pick up dropped stitches in garter stitch. Now while you can do this with a needle tip, it is so much easier to do it with a crochet hook. So if you have a crochet hook in your hot little hand, go and grab it. It's going to make your life so much easier. You want to ... First thing you wanna do is you wanna catch that working loop, that live loop, before it unravels all the way down. So you see my little guy here? He's in a complete stitch, so I'm gonna get him on my crochet hook so that nothing worse happens. You don't want it to unravel all the way down to the cast-on. The next thing you wanna do is give the work a little tug side to side and what that does, each row that is dropped makes basically the rung on a ladder and you wanna make sure that you go up your steps in the right order. If you've got it like this, sometimes you might twist and grab the wrong rung and you really want to go one rung at a time and you wanna go in the right order. So I'm gonna give this guy a little tug side to side and see that this is my next rung on the ladder. So for your very first time, you're gonna go through the front and pull up a loop. Now you have a 50-50 shot here whether you're right or whether you're wrong. So you're gonna grab that rung, you're gonna pull it through the stitch and you're gonna give it a little tug up. So, looks pretty good, looks like everybody else. So now, I'm gonna remove the crochet hook. I'm gonna come into that same loop under a rung and into that loop, but I'm gonna come through from the back. I'm gonna put the rung in the throat of the hook and I'm gonna pull it through. Take the hook out, put the hook in from the front. Go to the next rung. If you're not sure which one it is, pull the work side to side. Make sure that rung is in the throat of the hook and pull it through. Take him out, come under a rung and through the loop from the back. Put that rung in the throat of the hook, in that little hook-y part right there, and pull him through. And you're gonna keep doing this all the way up. Now remember when I did that first one and I said you had a 50-50 shot of whether you were right? Once you get the first stitch established, then it's easy to go front-to-back, back-to-front, front-to-back, back-to-front, et cetera. But say I was in the wrong place and I went front-to-back and it was not a front-to-back stitch? Look real close. Look right here and see what happened. It went garter, garter, garter, garter, stockinette. Garter, garter, garter, garter. So that's how I know that that would have been a back-to-front. So once you get the first one established, it's front-back-front-back-front-back-front-back. But you've got a 50-50 shot when you're pulling that first loop up as to whether you're right or you're wrong. But if you're right, you're great, and if you're wrong, you just pull it out and go the other way. And then once one is correct, the rest of them are correct. Now, once again, if you really felt the need to do this with a needle tip, you could. You could use the tips that you're using or you could grab just a spare needle. There's my next rung. I'm pulling the working loop over the rung and then for the next rung, I'm gonna come in from the back. I'm gonna go under that rung into that loop, put the rung closest to the tip, use the other needle tip to grab it and pull it over, but do you see why I think a crochet hook is easier? It will absolutely work if you don't have a crochet hook, but I do find the crochet hook to be far easier. Now does the gauge of the hook matter? No. It does not, because you are replacing stitches that you've already knit. So I actually use ... You can also notice my spare needle here is way smaller than the one that I was knitting with. A little smaller is easier cause it helps you get into the fiddly places. Now, when I get ... First off, let's take a look, and if that stitch looks a little big, which it does, some of that will even out in blocking or I can always go in with my needle tip and sort of spread the love. I can give that a little tug, give that a little tug, spread it out so that they're all the same. But blocking hides a multitude of sins. Now I have a couple of choices here. What I like to do is put a locking stitch marker in there if I'm not gonna deal with it right away, but you can knit up to where that stitch is and then get it in the right place. But honestly, I like to deal with it as soon as I can so I'm just gonna slip my stitches onto my spare needle or it could be the other needle in your set. Remember, when we slip we don't twist and we're not doing anything to the stitch. We're just moving it from one needle to the other. I'm gonna grab this last working loop. I'm gonna put it up on my left-hand needle because I'm right-handed. It would be the other way around if you were left-handed and I'm going to make sure, so there's my two legs of the stitch. There's my left leg and there's my right leg and I wanna make sure that my right leg is in the front. Then I can slip these stitches back and just knit that stitch as I always would when I come to it. Now you can fix any dropped stitch in garter stitch perfectly and no one will ever know that it happened. I'm Mary Beth Temple, here on behalf of the Knitting Circle. Thank you so much for joining me. We'll see you around. Bye.