Picking up a Dropped Stitch in Finished Knitting

Picking up a dropped stitch in your knitting is easy enough when the piece is on your needles. You simply hook it up, and slide the live stitch back onto your needle.

If you’re looking for how to do just that, check out this tutorial.

But what do you do when you find a dropped stitch in a finished piece? You can’t pick it up and knit it, because the knitting’s done!

This happened to me recently when my fiancé found a run in his Mitten Mittens [pattern].

Ouch!

We were on holiday (hence these shoddy iPhone pics), but luckily I had a ball of yarn that complemented the red of the mitts, a crochet hook and a needle. I was glad he found it when he did – if he had found the dropped stitch without me (we’re long distance), he probably would have ignored the stitch and it would have run further, or put the mittens away until I came to visit him.

I carefully hooked up all the stitches, just as you would if you were picking up a dropped stitch in a live piece of work. The only difference is that when all the stitches were picked up, I had a single stitch on my hook and nowhere to put it.

So turned the mitten inside out, and popped the stitch through.

I threaded my needle, and passed the yarn through the stitch, leaving a long tail just hanging out. I wove the first half of the yarn in firmly, unthreaded my needle, rethreaded it with the tail of the yarn, and wove in the second end.

This secured the live stitch.

Because of all the floats in the work, the repair is hardly visible from the inside – see those flecks of red under the thumb?

It can’t be seen at all from the right side!

There we have it – one repaired mitten, and two warm hands!