Meknitations: Undo a Stitch, Notice Exactly What is Happening to the Yarn

While creating stitches is an integral and important part of the knitting process, so is undoing stitches; whether you undo one stitch at a time (tinking) or undo several rows or rounds at once (frogging).

Understanding how a stitch is formed helps to better understand knitting. And that helps to make informed decisions on how to improve our knitting. The more we understand knitting, the better knitters we can become.

Tinking Your Stitches

In this case, we are focusing on tinking stitches or undoing one stitch at a time.

Really noticing what is happening when we undo one stitch at a time helps to understand knitting better. Pay attention to how the stitch is un-forming. That helps us to really understand how the stitch was formed in the first place.

Focus on what is happening to the yarn at every point along the stitch and in between the stitches. The more often you repeat this process, deliberately noticing the tiny things about how the yarn interacts with the stitches around it, the more you will understand your knitting and be able to be comfortable in manipulating it.

Reflecting on What You Notice When You Undo a Stitch

You may find it useful to

journal about what you notice
draw pictures of what you observe. The pictures don’t have to be works of art. They need only to help you understand what you learned as you paid attention to undoing the stitches.

Undo a Stitch Under Differing Circumstances

Noticing what happens when we undo various types of stitches (knits, purls, increases, decreased, etc.) helps us to understand all of these stitches better. Try this MeKnitation often under different circumstances, with different stitches, yarn, needles, etc.

Be Mindful

As an added benefit, just focusing on every step of the process (some of the time) helps us to be mindful and present at the moment in what we are doing. We hear about the benefits of mindfulness all the time.

Knitting can be very meditative om two seemingly opposing ways, both when we

get lost in the knitting and the stitches form themselves, This allows us to think about other important things in our lives.
really focus on the knitting at an almost microscopic level help us to be fully immersed in the knitting and not think about anything else.

Take a few moments every day to really focus on your knitting and how the stitches form and uniform. Be present with your knitting and spend some time really contemplating what is happening in between your needles.

Meknitation – pronounced with a short “e”, rhymes with meditation.