Although I have been a knitter all my life, when I saw the word “frogging” recently I really didn’t know what it meant so did a bit of research. I do hope that I’m not the only one to have to admit ignorance, so here’s what I found.
Frogging and Tinking Your Knit Mistakes Knitting mistakes happen to everyone.
If you happen to notice a mistake on the same row you are on, you can carefully work backward across the row to the place where the mistake happened and fix it right away. This is a knitting technique known as tinking. If you didn’t catch that, tink is knit spelled backward (again, a bit of knitting humor).
However, if you don’t notice a mistake for several rows, you might be forced to do some frogging. If the mistake is substantial and has changed the look of your project – you accidentally swapped the right and wrong sides or missed a cable turn – the easiest way to fix it is by taking the project off the needle and ripping back to before the mistake. You will then have to put the stitches back on the needle.
This is called frogging so when you frog, you “rip it, rip it.”
As quirky as the word is, it’s not much fun to have to frog your projects. Yet, you will be glad you did rather than leaving a mistake that you could have fixed.
Here's a YouTube video for "frogging":