#reading knitting

How to Count Rows in Knitting

Have you ever lost track of how many rows you’ve knit? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just look at your knitting to find out?

Well, you can. Yay! And I’m going to show you how to count rows in knitting right now.

Most of us, at some point, get confused by where we begin and end our counting. Do the stitches on the needles count as a row? When a pattern tells us to increase every 4th row, does…

Last year Therin was trying, quite patiently, to teach me to understand knitting better. She’d say “read your knitting”. She wanted me to look at the work as I knit and recognize the stitches and what effect they had on the work. Of course I understood the theory, but I just couldn’t see it. Might as well ask me to read Russian: I know what reading is and I know what Russian is (sort of) but I don’t read Russian. Can’t even recognize the characters.

The problem is further complicated by the fact that, as a novice, this knitter is trying to read her own text, inexpertly written in a foreign language. Can’t recognize these characters, either!

My other project right now is the Nuolitanssi shawl, in which each row ends “YO, knit, knit, knit”. How many times was the mistake that I forgot that final YO? But, that mistake was very helpful. At first, I’d realize that somewhere along the line I’d lost a stitch or two. Again and again, I ripped back 2, 3, 4 or 10 rows, trying to find the bugger. Not easy with lace.

Eventually, I learned to look at the end of the row to see if I’d missed that last YO. Very often, that was the culprit and I’d rip back a row or two. Before long, if the mistake was not at that very point, I could look back over the row and see if I’d missed a YO at another location; and instead of ripping, I’d mark it and fix it when working the next row.

The shawl is half done now. As I knit, I look at the entire pattern I’m working on. That is, I look at the previous rows as well as the current one. Yes, I believe I’m reading my knitting. As soon as the outline created by YO/decr loses its crispness or if the leaf looks lopsided, I slow down, figure out the problem and fix it. The mistake is usually identified as soon as it’s made. I haven’t ripped out a row in a long time. Better yet, by “reading the knitting” I’m not making as many mistakes.