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A Need for Speed to Tink

Tink (knit spelled backwards) refers to having to take knitted work out because some mistake has been found.  It requires the knitter individually remove the active stitch off the needle and pick up the stitch below it while simultaneously pulling the active yarn out of the picked up stitch.  Yeah and if you think reading the description is laborious, try doing it.  Personally I find it rather s-l-o-w.  Watch just the first 30 seconds or so of this video to see what it means to tink.

When I find a mistake some rows away from my active knitting it is rather satisfying to frog (ribbit-ribbit to rip-it rip-it) away rather quickly.  The entire project is taken off the needles and one rips away row after row until the mistake is removed.  Although this video  is not done with the usual flare that I frog something, you can see how harrowing it can be to have all those live stitches just hanging out there hoping to be picked up as you place them back on the needles.  It seems every time I do this in front of Tena and Pam I visibly see them pale at my flamboyant approach, and appropriately so.  There have been times where I've had to pull out much more than I wanted to because of my energetic frogging.

So when I found this approach recently done by TechKnitter call A faster, easier way to tink I knew I had to take a good look at this approach which uses both of the techniques described above.  She suggests using the frogging approach to the row or two before the mistake.  Then using a much thinner/smaller needle she recommends picking up the stitch below the active stitches (tinking) and then pulling out the thread.  When the process is complete one can simply knit the active stitches right off the smaller needle because the size of the stitch was created when it was first knit.    Check out the 1 minute video given to show one how to use this technique.  It seems this compromise is something I will be able to use in order to speed up my frogging/tinking in the future.

And why am I checking all this out, you might be asking?  I am knitting lace and for me there will enviably be both frogging and tinking involved.



  

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