Major unraveling mistake: help!

#1

Okay, so I made a huge mistake and I need to know how to fix it. I am doing a blanket and I made a mistake. It required me to unravel a row and a half.
So I unraveled the half row that I needed to, and I started on the next row. I was unraveling to the right. At one point I undid a stitch and all of a sudden the yarn was facing in the wrong direction. This meaning that it was positioned like I was unraveling to the left.

It is now so I can not unravel in the correct direction. It is making me unravel the part I already unraveled. Which, if I’m not mistaken, will make it some thing like this: ____-------- in terms of rows. That would screw it up, right?
How the heck do I fix this so I can go in the right direction? This is very important!

#2

This happened to me a long time ago, if I remember correctly I continued unraveling the way the yarn was now facing, so in your case to the left. After I finished unraveling to the end of that row, I unraveled back to the point where the unraveling switched directions I think then the entire row was even then. I would wait for someone else to respond before trying it though, just to be sure. Like I said this was a long time ago.

#3

haywardbookworm is right. Somewhere in the row you’re unraveling now, you may have put down the knitting and when you picked it up again, you started knitting in the wrong direction. Unravel in the reverse direction and you should then be able to continue to undo the next row up to the mistake.

#4

Thanks, guys. I was freaking out, because this is a super important project. It’s going to be part of an art gallery and I promised to make it. Thanks again :smiley:

#5

Okay… I did something wrong. I accidentally undid a stitch twice while continuing to unravel and it did the same thing… Darn it. I don’t think that I knit in the wrong direction twice. What’s am I doing wrong?

#6

Does this piece have short row shaping in it? Otherwise, if you were able to unknit the stitch twice and now one side is higher than the other, it does sound like picking up in the middle and knitting in the wrong direction. Can you count rows from the beginning on the right and left side to see if one side is actually higher than the other? Or can you look at the rows and see if you can spot another place where this occurred? Often there’s a small hole if you’ve switched direction. The only cure I can think of is to stop at the end of a row.
If it doesn’t show, can you continue on and ignore it?

#7

It’s prolly a little late to add my comment, but here is my 2 cents, after the fact. And you’ve prolly fixed the entire thing by now!

I never unravel (frog) [I]a half row. [/I] I always unravel in [I]whole rows.[/I]
Before I unravel, I put a safety pin on the RIGHT SIDE so that I would start out with a RS, or at least I’d know where I’m at…RS facing, or WS facing.

When I unraveled a half row [I]one time a few years back[/I]…I started back-tracking and knitting on top of the stuff that wasn’t unraveled. It’s easy to get turned around. :eyes: Even for me, an old-time knitter! Frogging that hot mess wasn’t easy, but I finally got back on track!

Knitting two sleeves on one needle is hard, too. You get turned about! Ya can’t remember where you’re at. Afterwards, [I]I read a tip[/I] that you should add a safety pin between the two sleeves, kinda making them “hold hands”…so that you always have the RS facing for both sleeves! Oy! I don’t do two sleeves on one needle anymore! :wall:

#8

I can’t exactly see if one side is higher than the other. The blanket is also about 260+ stitches across and at least 30 rows long. The design in VERY complex, so it makes it difficult. I’m doing intarsia to make a Super Mario scene into a blanket. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, here is a picture of what it looks like bunched up on the needle:

The needle is 32" long and it takes up that much space on it.
Yeah… you can see how this is complicated! Haha. I’ll try to see if I knit in the wrong direction twice. I almost always put it down before I’m finished with a row because it’s so long and there’s so much color changing.

#9

Before you go on with it, if you have another needle put half the sts on it, or use some leftover yarn. You probably need to spread it out to make sure you didn’t start going the wrong direction on the half row. When you begin knitting in the middle of a row, the yarn should be coming off the R needle, not the L as if you were at the end of a row. But spread it out and see if that’s going on.

#10

You might try the technique in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVeUteBJEsI

[B]However, I’m not sure this will work with more than one color, so maybe try it on a swatch first![/B]

#11

The method, antares linked for you is really good. It will just be hell to keep track of staying in the same row for your whole project.

That is quite the blanket, you are making. But really… I would not be surprised if you would be knitting over the wrong way a few times (since with the color changes the yarn comes from different sides). So maybe putting it down within a color field will make it easier than after a color field…

Maybe also a 2-link stitch marker on one end of your project would help. I have the multi-markers here in my blog (they also work great for row count, so maybe check it out)
But just a simple one of two interlinked loops of different colors … one for right side and one for wrong side… will help a lot in this project. Then you will always know, which side you were just on.

Good luck with that monster!