This is a hard thing to explain, but I’ll give it a shot. I’ve been following a pattern that has a lot of m1 in it - Diamante Socks from Knitty.com. The pattern is most definitely not the problem though.
After knitting about half the sock, I’m at the heel now, I started losing a st and figured out it was at my m1. This is the “lift from front to back and knit into back loop” m1. What I sometimes do is if I miss the knit (the needle slips out when trying to knit through the back loop) it seems to pull out the previous st I knit from the right-hand needle. Took me a while to figure out, because I was losing sts, but nothing was unraveling down (still haven’t figured that one out).
Once I finally figured out what was happening, I’m extra careful, and if I miss that st I recount everything to make sure I haven’t lost anything. Thing is, I can’t figure out how to fix this once it’s happened and I move on. If the st would unravel like any other dropped st, then that would be easy, but it doesn’t seem to. I have to let go of my m1 loop, then I kind of see the st I dropped, but it doesn’t look right after I fix it like other dropped sts.
Geez, that doesn’t seem to make sense, but I hope someone will understand what I’m trying to say and help me find a way to fix it properly. As careful as I’ve been, it’s happened a couple of time since.
It isn’t the M1 that falls off, it’s the previous st (from the right hand needle) that slips off. It doesn’t seem to unravel, or if it does (I’m just thinking of this now) it’s only to a previous row, either 1 or 2 down, because it was a M1 before.
I guess my new question with this new information is, is there a way to re-do a M1 on a previous row? Yikes, probably not. At least now I’m more on the look out and have learned to check before getting a better grip on my working yarn to try again.
If I’d been doing this from the beginning, I wouldn’t have this problem (and possible holes) right in the middle like this!! Oh well, live and learn.
Sure you can put it in again. Take the yarn strand between stitches where it was originally, give it a twist and pull the yarn from the row above through it to make the next stitch and so on until you get back to where you are now. It’s like picking up a dropped stitch as show in the Fixing Mistakes section of the Tips page. It’s just that you pick up the yarn with a twist like the original M1 to start.
Just to make sure I get this, I make a loop of the yarn strand to twist it as it would be when I pick it up, then go up however many rows I need (probably 1 or 2, excluding knit rows) as I would a regular st. Okay, that sounds easy enough…I should have figured that out.