Thursday, May 31, 2007

Knits-plicit #1

It's been brought to my attention by the fabulous and friendly Bink that of course not all who read this blog are knitters! *crowd gasps* hehe So I've decided that little nuggets of knitterly explicit language will occasionally have to be defined when I forget to do so at the time of posting!

Today's knitsplicit term is "frog".
I frog, they frog, we are frogging, I have frogged.

The term refers to the unravelling of a knitted item - either partially completed or finished by removing the needles from the knitting, leaving the live stitches *gasp* exposed and pulling on the working yarn strand so the live stitches are pulled back through the row below and thus undone. In some cases, such as My So Called Frog, this must be done slowly and carefully - perhaps the yarn is delicate such as mohair and will come apart if engaged in rough-play, or in the case of my scrummy colinette the stitch fibres have felted ever so slightly to the other stitches next to them which stops me from pulling the working yarn through very easily, I often have to stop and gently pull the fibres apart before I can go on. Other times it is a very quick process and can be unzipped down the rows disturbingly speedily, with big sweeps of the arm as you "rip it, rip it, ribbit" - hence the term "frogging", or "going to the frog pond".


Teresa, from knitty.com explains frogging very well in this article. She also includes some helpful tips on frogging, and my personal favourite - a description of tink-ing back *grin* Which is 'un-knitting' if you will, hence K-N-I-T backwards = T-I-N-K, tink! Which I like very much as it sounds magical and makes me think of my faery days :) It's also a good technique to become familiar with as tinking back allows you to stay in control of your knitting as you un-knit a few rows to get to a small problematic area.

frogging

This cross stitch pattern from stitchykitty.com illustrates the widely held dislike for frogging!

Thus ends the knitsplicit lesson for today!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yay!!! It's only 8:40 and I have already learnt two things today!! Can I go home now??

Thanks :)