Picking the Stitches Back Up After You Rip
Okay. Last time we frogged something. Maybe you actually did it on your own project, maybe you just believed me that it needed doing. Either way, you've got a live loop on your hook and a raggedy edge below it and no idea what to do next. That's today.
Ripping out is the easy part, honestly. Pulling your work back up is where people panic and I want to walk you through it slow, because there's a right way to grab your place and a wrong way, and the wrong way turns one mistake into three.
Find your row
Before you do anything, look at the row you frogged back to. Count the stitches across it. Lay it flat on your knee if you have to. You want to know for a fact that this row is the right number, the correct one for your pattern, before you build on top of it. If you rip back and immediately start crocheting without checking, you're just going to make the same mistake again one row sooner. I've done it. It's not a good use of an evening.
Get the hook in the right spot
Here's the part that trips people up. When you frog, you're pulling the yarn out loop by loop, and the last loop — the live one, the one still on your hook or that you're holding with your fingers — needs to sit in your hook the same way a stitch always does. Not twisted. Not with the working yarn coming off the wrong side.
Look at the stitch. The two strands that make up the top of it, the "V," should sit flat, and your hook goes under both of them, front to back, same as it would picking up any stitch mid-row. If you're not sure which strand is the working yarn, follow it with your finger back to the ball. It'll tell you.
(You will get this backward at least once. Everybody does. You'll crochet a stitch or two into it and immediately see that it's twisted funny and have to back up again. That's fine. It's not a step back, it's just Tuesday.)
Do one test stitch before you commit
Once your hook's in the loop, work a single stitch — whatever your pattern calls for, single crochet, double, whatever — and then stop and look at it. Does it look like the stitches next to it? Same height, same lean, same everything? If yes, you're set, keep going. If it looks a little off, pull that one stitch back out and check your hook placement again before you do ten more of them.
This is the whole trick to picking back up cleanly. You check once, carefully, instead of crocheting a whole row on faith and finding out four inches later that you started from the wrong loop.
When it's more than one row down
Sometimes the mistake isn't in the row right below your hook. It's six inches down, buried, and you have to rip back through rows you know were fine just to get to the one that wasn't.
I did this with an entire afghan once. Not a washcloth — this was years back, a big one, granny squares joined into a blanket for one of the grandkids. I was about two-thirds through it and noticed a mistake in a row a good six inches below where I currently was. One row. Everything above it was worked correctly, the whole rest of the afghan was fine, but that one row bugged me every single time I looked at it. I could feel it under my hands even when I wasn't looking right at it.
So I frogged the whole thing back to it. Weeks of work, gone, on purpose. Ronald thought I had lost my mind over a blanket nobody but me would ever notice was wrong. I did not care even a little. I fixed the row and crocheted the whole thing back up again, and it's better now, and I'd do it again.
My opinion on this, stated plainly: frog it. Just frog it. Pulling out your work isn't failure, it's the whole skill, and the people who quit crochet are usually the ones who never learned to rip back without treating it like a tragedy. Ruin ten rows if you have to. Fix them. That's the job.
A real caution
If you're frogging back several rows, do it in stages rather than yanking the whole tail at once. Pull out a row, check your stitch count, pull out another. If you tug the working end hard and fast through a big pile of stitches, it can knot up on itself, especially with cotton, which grips more than acrylic does. A tangled mess mid-frog is its own special headache and I'd rather you avoid it.
Before next time
Practice this on purpose, even if nothing's currently wrong. Work a few rows, rip back two of them, and pick the stitches back up clean before you go any further. It's a better use of scrap yarn than you'd think.