So you are knitting your first lace project, and you’ve got the wrong number of stitches and you’re stuck and you don’t want to frog. I’m here to help. But! My advice depends on you being able to read your stitches on the last patterned row (whether that’s every row or every other row depends on the pattern). If you don’t know how to do that, try knitting a swatch and putting in some decreases, double decreases, yarn overs, etc and then look at your work to locate those stitches and see how they look.
First advice: if your pattern is repeating, put a stitch marker in between each repeat. It’s possible these stitch markers will move, but you need to know which repeat(s) you’ve made a mistake on and this makes that much easier because you’ll realize you made a mistake when you get to the end of the repeat instead of the end of the row. I know not everyone does this, but I’ve been knitting 15 years and I see no shame in taking all the help you can get. All the advice here assumes you are doing this.
So after you’ve separated out all your repeats, and you get to the end of a repeat and are missing a stitch! What to do? Missing stitches are usually either 1) forgot a yarn over somewhere 2) dropped a stitch.
Forgotten yarn overs are an easy fix if you can find where the yarn over was SUPPOSED to be. Tink (un-knit, knit spelled backwards, means to undo your stitches one at a time as opposed to just ripping them all out.) back to the stitch before the missing yarn over (YO). If the missing YO is in the row you’re knitting, simply add the YO and keep going. If it’s in the row before (or second row before if every other row is plain), tink back to right before the missing YO, and insert the left needle into the bar between stitches as if to do a make one increase (there’s YouTube tutorials out there). Knit the stitch without twisting it. This is your new Jerry riggedYO.
If your missing stitch is NOT a missing yarn over, it’s time to start looking for dropped stitches. Sometimes these are just impossible to find because they rip down to whatever YO they came from and that can be really difficult to spot. If your pattern is symmetrical, look for missing symmetry. If it isn’t, look for differences between this repeat and other repeats of the pattern.
Now, finding these missing stitches and then knowing what to do with them are two different things. Ask yourself: if I use a crochet hook and go slowly, can I fix this? If the answer is no, please don’t give up. Let me tell you a secret. I make. So. Many. Mistakes. When I knit. And sometimes you just have to fudge. Pick a spot that works best for the pattern and just add another stitch. I prefer knit front and back (kfb) but you can also make 1 left or right (m1L/m1R). I promise it’ll be hard for anyone besides you to spot.
But what if we have an extra stitch? These either come from missing decreases, forgetting part of a double double decrease, or an extra yo hanging out where it has no business hanging out.
Go back and read your work. First look for any extra YOs. If you notice an extra YO, tink back to it and just drop it. It’ll mess with your tension but that’s what blocking is for.
Once that’s ruled out, look at any double decreases you have. If you are doing a decrease where you slip stitches and pass them over other stitches and off the needle (pass slipped stitch over or psso), did you remember to do the psso part? I forget this sometimes even tho all I knit is lace.
This is my personal most frequent decrease mistake. If you made that mistake on your current row, tink back and pass the stitch like it’s supposed to go. If it was a previous row, tink back to where you made that mistake, and either knit two together (k2tog, right leaning decrease) or slip slip knit (ssk, left leaning decrease), whichever leans the correct way.
So there’s no extra YOs and your double decreases are good? Time to look at your normal decreases. Do you have any decreases that you missed? Tink back and do them. If they were missed on the current row, just knit as instructed. If they were a row ago, you might have to do some analyzing to figure out where the right place is, but go back and decrease as close to where it was supposed to be as possible.
I cannot begin to tell you how forgiving lace is of mistakes. Hell. I spent 18 months knitting this
And when I got it all laid out, IT HAD TWO HOLES IN IT. I’m still mad about it but I fixed them well enough that I could block it aggressively. Can you see where I missed stitches, my tension was weird, I had extra stitches for some fucking reason, etc? No! You can’t! This is what blocking is for.
Blocking is the heavenly primordial being who wipes away all your mistakes and knitting sins and says “You worked hard on this, and it looks heavenly, good job.” You should block everything, not just lace. It evens your tension and can give you a little leeway if something is just a little bit too small. Got a sweater with two slightly different sized sleeves? Blocking.
And if you really don’t believe me that blocking fixes almost anything, take a look at this:
You can’t see the beads in this photo, but this shawl has somewhere around 1500 beads. I decided right off the batt I wasn’t going to be frogging beads. So this became a YOLO project. I gave myself permission to make mistakes and just fudge the solutions. Can you see my dozens (literally dozens) of mistakes? No!!
So don’t be afraid that your lace isn’t going to turn out right. Cuz only you can see that spot where you dropped a stitch completely or that double decrease you forgot to do or whatever other mistakes you may have made. Blocking will fix a lot. And even if there’s still a glaringly obvious hole somewhere (I have one that drives me nuts in the white shawl but no one else can spot it), I promise it’s not glaringly obvious to anyone else and also everyone here on knitblr doesn’t care and if someone gives you a hard time tag me and I’ll scold them for you.
