How do I prevent ‘rowing’ (out?) in my knitting. It’s when a number of stitches in a row appear to be looser in some way than the rest of the row(s) in stockinette work. It’s often one leg of the stitches. I’ve tried knitting at the very tips of the needle, tugging on each completed stitch (but that affects my gauge) and stretching the work a bit as I go. I believe its a problem with my tension but no matter how careful and focused (NO TV!) I am I will end up with these problem areas. Dropping and reknitting these stitches does NOT help. Thanks.
When you knit a stitch you normally do these steps:
- open the stitch (forcing wider with needle)
- pull yarn through with help of the needle
- slide off the stitch
What you described happens at the first step. When you open the stitch you pull the previous stitch’s left leg smaller. Usually this will not be visible after the first wash. I would not worry about one leg being bigger than the other.
Sometimes the yarn is at fault. I’ve been working with a variegated Red Heart Super Saver. Yarn thickness and texture varies greatly and the thicker parts don’t like work to the gauge of the rest of the yarn; some sections are just grabbier and that affects stitch size too. With this I finally decided to live with it and see how it looks after washing.
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Thanks, GG< for that info. I have noticed with some yarn the problem is minimal.
Thank you for that breakdown. It does make sense. I will certainly watch how I open the stitch at the start. I tend to block all my knitting projects and that process doesn’t always fix the problem.
It’s also possible that your tension between knit rows and purl rows is different. You could test it out by working the purl rows with a size smaller needle. It’s often the purl sts that are a bit looser.