Can you tighten loosely knitted stitches

by Allison

Is there a way to tighten loosely knitted rows? I cast on too loosely. Now the neck of a baby sweater is not small enough.

I am knitting on circular needles from the top down. I have about 20 rows done.

YOUR ANSWER

You have a couple of options, none of the are particularly easy though.

First you could unpick what you have done so far and start again. This is probably what I would do.

Second, you could finish knitting the sweater and then run some fine elastic around your cast on edge to tighten it up.

Or third, you could use a crochet hook and pull the thread to tighten each stitch one at a time across your cast on edge.

Fixing this way would give the best result (except for unpicking and starting again) but it is a time consuming and tedious exercise with no guarantee that you will be successful. If you are not careful, some of the stitches will be tighter than others making it look worse than it does now.

As I said above, if it was me I would unpick and start again...