Fixits

Some interesting questions have been coming in to me at knitmaven@sbcglobal.net. One in particular intrigues me because it happens to all of us:

Please help! I have a recurring problem of knitting into the stitch in the row below and slipping off both stitches together. This occurs when doing stockinette stitch more times than I'd care to admit. I usually don't discover the mistake until many more rows have been knit. I've tried dropping the stitch back to the mistake, but can't hook it up properly. The first "bar" doesn't line up. So I drop down the stitch next to it which helps if I drop the one on the correct side! I've looked and looked for an answer to this in books from Mary Thomas to the current ones and have yet to see it addressed. Certainly it must happen to other folks, but they probably catch it on the next row or round. Sure hope you can help. Thanks, Marylyn in VA

Well, I thought, what does an accidental stitch knit along with its downstairs neighbor (a la brioche) look like? All by its lonesome?
This:
See that big fat stitch right in the middle, two rows down from the needle, the stitch that's elbowing the stitches to its right and left out of vertical allignment? Yes, that one. That's the one I knit along with its next-row-below neighbor. (I love making mistakes on purpose. Go figure.)

What to do about it? Time for a vertical fix. Get out your crochet hook, nimble fingers, whatever you use to grab a stitch when it's off the needle. Knit to the stitch before the big fat one (B.F.O.). Drop down to B.F.O. It looks like this:
If you look closely at the stitch, it's doubled. That's because it grabbed its neighbor during knitting -- and its neighbor's ladder. That's why you only see one ladder in this photo.
If you pull apart B.F.O., it looks like it ought to:
B.F.O. is now just an ordinary stitch, one that's leaving its neighbors in peace. Now there are ladders that can easily be hooked up back to the needle:


This is what peaceful coexistence looks like:
Nobody trying to elbow out the neighbors. Nobody pushing things out of whack. Feel free to send this photo to your favorite world leader. Just a thought.