Sunday, July 27, 2014

Tinking? Just rip it out!

Remember "a tinker, a tailor, a knitter, a sailor"?  No?  That's because Marash Girl just made up the last two words in the old nursery rhyme in order to introduce you to a new concept -- no, not a new concept, a new word -- no, not a new word, but an old word applied to an old concept that makes knitting more complicated than it need be!  According to a recent internet posting, tinking for the knitter means knitting backwards, a method of undoing stitch by stitch a row of knitting in order to repair an error that has been made (most likely by you) earlier in the row.  For Marash Girl (and, yes, you can assume here that Marash Girl knits), if the error occurred near the beginning of the row, it's easier just to rip out the whole row, error automatically corrected, (sort of like erasing a line of writing that doesn't sound right rather than trying to correct one word in the line)  and replace the stitches recently removed from your needle back on to the needle, or, continuing the metaphor of writing, simply starting from the end of the last sentence and rewriting the whole sentence. [Would that we could do this with our lives, right?]  Tinking probably has its origins in the word tinkering, the act of trying to repair something.  You Latin scholars out there:  have fun with waxing eloquent on this one!


1 comment:

  1. A stitch in time saves nine.
    Tinker, tailor, preacher, gardener. (Our family)

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