What does it mean to "FROG" your knitting?

Knitters have a small vocabulary of words that are only understood within the community.

Whether you have too many WIPs (work in progress) or UFOs (unfinished objects) sometimes you just need to start over.

That’s called FROGGING.

Why?

No one really knows.

Some people think its a more polite four letter “F” word.

There’s a good case that it was originally an insult towards the French.

But I like to think its because when you start over your knitting, you have to *rip-it, rip-it, rip-it* A LOT.

When to frog a project?

Deciding whether or not to frog is not always easy. Who wants to have to redo something?

It’s heartbreaking to admit you did something wrong, much less give up on the time you’ve already put in.

That being said, here are three reasons you might decide to frog your knitting.

You want to start over the project.

Maybe you cast on the wrong number of stitches or you don’t like the yarn you’re using or you’re coming back to a project and you can’t remember where you were.

In this case you’re going to rip out the whole thing and begin again.

You need to fix a mistake

Most of the time you’ll be frogging your work in order to fix a mistake a few rows back. It may not be possible to drop down a stitch column and fix it, so you need to rework the whole row or section.

This is where using something like a lifeline can be extremely helpful!

You want to recycle or reuse the yarn

If you’ve truly given up on a project, or perhaps you just didn’t like how it turned out, then you may want to reuse the yarn for something else.

I mean, its perfectly good yarn. It doesn’t have to stay trapped in a project you don’t love.

Why you should learn to love frogging

One of our mantras as Fearless Knitters is to embrace our mistakes.

So often we give up instead of starting over, or just taking the time to go back and do it right.

Making a mistake does not mean you have failed.

It is an opportunity to learn.

And by taking time to learn from those mistakes you are investing in your future self.

You will knit more fearlessly because you’ve been there and done that.

So if you are hesitating to frog a section of a project, don’t be afraid to rip-it.