How to Pick Up a Dropped Stitch in Knitting

You're happily knitting along making great progress on your project and suddenly you notice you dropped a stitch. Yikes! Do you have to tear your work out all the way back to the dropped stitch? Fortunately, the answer is no. Dropped stitches are one of the most common knitting mistakes made by beginners and advanced knitters alike. The good news is that they are relatively easy to fix and you typically don't need to tear out your work to go back and pick them up. Instead, you can solve this problem with a crochet hook. Here's how.

First, you will need to knit across the row until you are directly over the spot where you dropped the stitch. You can tell where this is because the work below won't have loops like the rest of your project, but instead will look a little bit like a ladder with horizontal pieces of yarn lined up parallel to each other.

Next, find a crochet hook that is an appropriate size to easily grab whatever yarn you are working with. Thicker yarn will take a larger crochet hook and thinner yarn will be fine with a small crochet hook.

From the "knit" side of your work, insert the crochet hook into the dropped stitch from front to back and grab the first rung of the yarn ladder (the horizontal pieces of yarn running parallel to each other). Pull the yarn through the stitch. Repeat this process until you have worked your way all the way back up to your needles and then put the stitch back on the needle.

From the "purl" side of your work the process is essentially the same except instead of going through the stitch from front to back with the crochet hook you will go through it from back to front and pull the yarn through. Again, repeat this process until you have worked your way back to your needles, put the stitch back on your needles and continue knitting as usual.

This easy process allows you to pick up dropped stitches without tearing out your work and leaves your work looking great so no one will ever know you dropped a stitch in the first place.

This is a handy skill to have so you may want to knit up a test swatch a few inches wide and practice dropping and picking up stitches to get the hang of it before you have to do it in a real project that you have put a lot of time and effort into.