Frogging, in the knitting world, means to completely unravel a piece of knitted work.
Remember my beautiful Rolling Rock sweater I completed a few months ago? It no longer exists in sweater form. It has been frogged.
“Jane!” you exclaim, “That’s terrible! Why? After all your hard work!”
You’d be right there. It was a lot of hard work. But it turned out to be simply too fitted. And I figure, if I’m going to be making clothes for myself, I want them to fit correctly. And so, I frogged it.
How to Frog
I always find inspiration on YouTube from Stacey Perry of VeryPink Knits. Her video about reusing yarn is super helpful.
I would just make one note: I did NOT take the ball off the ball winder once I had finished unraveling. I kept it on there and wound the yarn around the swift, and put it back into hank form from there. It just seemed a little easier than dealing with the cake of yarn rolling all over the place.
How I Got to This Point
You might think that this must be the world’s most frustrating thing to do. After spending hours on a project, having to rip it out and start over again must be maddening.
You wouldn’t be wrong.
In my case, I wasn’t so frustrated, because I did see it coming. I tried on my sweater periodically, and I knew it was more fitted than I had wanted. But I kept telling myself I would be sure to like it when it was done.
But when I had finally finished it, I had to be completely honest.
I was never going to wear this sweater.
It was going to be one of those things that sat in my closet and I never put on because it clung a bit too unforgivingly to my curves. *Sigh* I simply had to frog it.
Where is the Emotional Value in Frogging?
Frogging does have its value. It is a rather cathartic exercise. It’s fun to see how quickly you can unravel something that took HOURS to make (did I say “fun”? I guess I’m masochistic).
But of more value still is the thought process that leads to frogging as a conclusion.
We want everything we do to be successful and beautiful, but that’s not always going to happen. Some things simply don’t turn out well.
And that is okay!
It’s okay to fail at things, and recognize that we have failed. Especially when failure is so relatively unimportant, as in the case of an ill-fitting sweater.
Frogging allows us to acknowledge our failure, embrace it, learn from it, and try again (or move on).
Try, Try Again
I plan to make this sweater again. An indication that something was wrong should have been that I had an entire skein of yarn leftover. Seeing as I had an over abundance, I will make the sweater again in a larger size.
No one likes to have to admit that we need a larger size, but hey. That’s life. It’s hard not to slowly expand as the years go by and the baby weight never totally comes off (SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ME I’M NOT ALONE ON THIS).
At the very least, I will have a beautiful, nicely fitting sweater that will flatter my new figure.
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