I was knitting on Thermal while invigilating an exam. And I found I had made a mistake. And I figured out a fix that didn't involve ripping back. I'm sure this is what Elizabeth Zimmerman would have called an "unvention," I find it impossible to believe I am the first who came up with this solution, but I've never seen it in a book (then again, few knitting books have sections on "how to fix problems when they come up")

The problem that had happened was that on one of the k2p2 rows, I had gotten off rhythm - I knitted stitches that were supposed to be purled and vice versa. This problem lasted for about 16 stitches, and then I had spontaneously corrected it. (Sometimes not watching what you're doing, and working by feel, isn't the best thing.).

When I found the problem out, I had knit the rest of the round, right up to the messed up stitches. (Nonknitters, if you are reading this: the stitches to-be-knit are on the lefthand needle, and the stitches you just knit are on the righthand needle. The "working yarn" - the one that comes off from the ball- is closest to the stitch just worked, the first stitch on the right side). So, I was ready to knit the stitches but they were messed up.

I thought of first applying the Running Horse Rule - if you can't see a mistake from a perch on a running horse, it probably doesn't matter - but I'm too compulsive for that. And I couldn't face unknitting some 290 stitches if I were going to to the "traditional" fix of unknitting everything up to the point where the problem first occurred, and then redoing that whole round. (this is a very fine-gauge yarn, knit in the round)

So I thought - and realized, couldn't I just unknit the messed-up stitches, and redo them? (A more elegant solution would be to do a stitch-by-stitch "conversion" - turn the purls into knits and vice versa, but I'm not so good at that).

So, I had the messed-up stitches on the left-hand needle, right? So what I started off doing was to pass each stitch, one by one, to the right-hand needle, un-knitting it as I went. I let the loop of unworked yarn that formed stay on the back of the work. When I had unknit all the stitches, I had the 16 unworked stitches plus a big loop of yarn behind them. (Essentially what I had, was a short segment of the "previous" round in the middle of the current round, topologically speaking). Then, I passed all the stitches BACK to the left hand needle (so they could be worked) and carefully, stitch by stitch, knitted or purled (as was appropriate) using the loop of yarn in the back - the loop that had come off was from the stitches originally.

It did get a bit tight towards the end but by being careful, I managed to do it.

So, then I had the reknitted stitches on the right-hand needle. In order to get back to where the "working yarn" was where it needed to be, I then had to move those stitches back again to the left hand needle.

But that fixed it. I was able to finish the round, everything looks right, even the slightly wonky tight stitches that formed at the end of the "loop" got evened out when I knit the next row.

As I said, I'd be very surprised to find that lots of other people haven't figured out this fix already. But I don't think I've ever seen it written up anywhere.* When I figure something out like that - with just recourse to my own brain and a sense of "well, this seems like it should work" and it works, I am almost irrationally pleased with myself. I think I feel more ingenious and competent when I figure out a little simple fix for a problem almost than I do after solving some issue with teaching, or successfully dealing with interpersonal yuck**, or even in some cases, solving a research problem.

(*It's a good thing knitting isn't like biology, or I'd have to do a literature search before posting this fix and cite the people who had written about it before. And then my writeup would probably get turned down as being insufficiently novel.)

(**because interpersonal yuck, even when I solve it, usually leaves me tired and sad.)