Stitches Fell Off the Needle

If you've been knitting for any length of time, you probably have had your stitches just fall off your needle. Maybe you're like me and you have a tendency to just throw your knitting project into your knitting bag and go on your merry way. And then when you go back to pull out your project, your stitches have fallen off the needle. So I'm gonna just show you to a few different examples of different little swatches and projects and I have pulled the uh needles uh either completely out or partially out of the uh project and we are going to get them back on the needle. Um So that way when you find yourself in this predicament, you know how to fix it. So the first one I have here was something that I was just knitting back and forth in rows on some, just regular single point, just your regular old traditional knitting needles. And you can see here, I have some live stitches and I've got my yarn, but I don't obviously have my little swatch on the needle. So how do I fix this? Well, it really does kind of depend on what you want to do. I have a tendency to first just try to get the stitches back onto the needle and then work it out and get everything situated oriented in the right way. So this is um a wool yarn and the advantage of using wool yarns in your projects is that the stitches are kind of sticky. And so a lot of times when your needle comes out of your project, your stitches will kind of just stay right there, which is nice. So what I'm gonna do is just take one needle and start moving from right to left and picking up the stitches and you can do this. Um you know, either way with your left needle or your right needle, whichever one you're comfortable with. But I just try to slide one needle just straight back through it and then figure out what I need to do to get back going in the right direction. So I've just simply slipped them all back on. And now let's just take a look at the stitches. So when you are knitting, unless you are a combination knitter or your pattern is telling you to tow your stitches in some way, your right leg of your stitch is gonna want to be coming down over the front here. So the right leg of your stitch is towards the front of your needle and then the left, the and then the left leg of your stitch is coming down the back and is behind your needle. So you can see, I have my yarn here right in the middle. And so we know that's not correct. So now I'm just gonna take my other needle and simply slip the stitches over until I get to where my yarn is. And I'm slipping these stitches pearl wise again, making sure that that right leg is coming down in front of my needle. And now that I've done that, I've gotten to the point where I have my yarn when you are picking up your stitches. Um And especially in this case, where everything came out in the middle of a row. I know that I need to start knitting this way that I'm gonna continue on this way because my working yarn that's going to my ball of yarn is coming off my right needle. So if I had picked everything up this way, it would be, maybe you picked it up something like this and then you started knitting this way, you have this big gap here and that's not correct. You want to make sure that you have your yarn coming off that right needle just like that and you can continue knitting. So that's all there is to that when you're talking about, um, you know, a flat project that you're working on regular uh knitting needles. I have another example here and this is if I uh had a project on double points, you can see here I have two needles that have the stitches on them. And then I have this where my third needle was, all my stitches have fallen off and again, it's just gonna be the same thing. I'm just gonna, first, my first priority is making sure just to get those stitches back up on the needle just like that. And in this particular case, the yarn was way over here. So we didn't need to worry. It was just that they completely all fell off on that one needle and we were able to simply put them back on again. A lot of times you're just gonna want to be putting your needle in from right to left and making sure you're kind of going pearl wise again, making sure that right leg of the stitch is coming down in front here. I have an example of some circular knitting here. Um where I'm just knitting on a circular needle and just a few stitches have fallen off. But what's also happened is kind of like the first example we've kind of stopped here in the middle of where we were working. So we can see our working yarns coming off right here. We still have a couple of stitches here. So in this case, you might want to use your left needle and your right needle to get back on track. So I'm gonna take my left needle and slip and you can see here I have, I'm just gonna pull that out a little bit. So you can see I have this stitch right here and when I'm slipping it back on, I'm making sure that that right leg is coming down in front and then I can take my right needle and start slipping them on. The other thing you can do if it is easier because here it's a little tight because I had my stitches perfectly. Um, pretty much lined up. So on my 16 inch circular, um, there's not a lot of stretch to this. So you can't even slowly un knit these live stitches that are just, um hanging out and have fallen off. And I just slowly pull out the yarn and then slip that stitch onto the left needle, pull out the next one, put the stitch on, next one, put the stitch on and the next one and just keep going. Like, so now while I did that, I can see that with this yarn for some of the stitches, I ended up splitting the pli a little bit, which is not gonna make our um knitting look the best. So then once I've got everything back up on the needle again, my working yarn is coming off my right needle, I'll just simply start working my pattern again, which I'm just knitting in the round here and just doing knit stitches. So this stitch I have a split ply. So when I'm gonna work into that stitch, I just want to make sure that I'm fixing it first and then working that stitch and then you can just continue on with your pattern again. Here you can see I have just this little bit of a where I've split the Plies and I'm just gonna take that and get everything back up on the needle and then knit it. And then finally, I have this example of magic loop. And so magic loop is where you are using one long circular to um knit in the round. So this is often used for small circumference knitting, um like for knitting, um socks or mittens or something like that. And so I have some of the stitches that have fallen off here. And I also was working in a ribbing pattern. I'm again, just gonna slip the stitches slowly onto the needle just like that. And again, I have my working yarn over here and now, first, what I would probably do is just pick up these chew just so we have saved them. Then I'm going to pull out my back needle like you would for magic loop, get these two stitches that still need to be knit on this side over onto the left hand needle again, making sure that that right leg is coming down in front. And then I can just continue. And actually, in this case, we're going to pearl. So I'm going to just pearl those last two stitches. So as you can see it can be a little bit fiddly to get your stitches back on the needle. Um, once they've fallen off, but it's not impossible. Your project is not ruined. And hopefully this helps you the next time the stitches fall off your needle.