I will be posting six days a week for the month of April - (with a rest day on Sunday).
Each post will begin with the corresponding letter of the alphabet beginning with A and finishing with the letter Z.
I began participating in this challenge in 2012. With the exception of last year, I believe I completed the challenge each year. Last year I lost steam somewhere around the letter W.
Tink
There are two meanings I will tell you about for this word.
Tink
It's a nickname I was given when I was a 19 year old woman entering the corporate world for the first time. It was in the accounting department.
In order to explain the nickname I have to describe what I looked like at age 19. My height was (yes was) 4 foot 11 inches. I weighed 87 pounds.
One of the older guys in the group began calling me "Tinkerbell" which later became shortened to Tink. I was not offended by this because I considered the man to be a kindly, fatherly figure who took me under his wing. I think of that time and the man fondly.
Ironically, when I was a small child of 6 or 7 years old, my mom made me a Tinkerbell costume for Halloween.
"Tink" is another Knitting Acronym. If you look at it carefully you will notice that Tink is Knit spelled backwards.
Sometimes a knitter may be going merrily along when she notices that the item she is knitting doesn't quite look like the pattern she has been following. After a huge sigh, she checks her work and most likely will find she has made a mistake a few rows back.
There are several ways to handle this. Some knitters have a pretty laid back attitude and may choose to ignore the mistake with the justification that "no one will notice".
I've done that. I've found out, though, that I am not as laid back as I thought and finally have to admit that someone will notice and it will bother the heck out of her. The her being me.
Depending on the weight of the yarn, another thing a knitter who has made a mistake may do is take the needles out of the project and pull out the stitches until she comes to the row before she made the mistake. She then has to carefully put the stitches back on the needle. It is easier to do this with thicker yarn because the stitches hold up more easily and probably won't unravel as she is putting the stitches back on the needle. Doing this with thin yarn is quite the challenge.
The third method is to Tink.
Tinking is basically undoing each stitch one by one until the knitter gets to the mistake. At that point she can correct it and begin knitting again. If the knitter doesn't feel it's worth it to fix the mistake, but doesn't want to continue knitting leaving the mistake, she might choose to take the whole thing out. That's called "frogging". I'm assuming that's because the knitter is ripping out the knitting. And ripping sounds like "ribbit" "ribbit" a sound a frog makes.
I've used all three methods to fix a knitting mistake. I've also had the great satisfaction of frogging a project, especially if it has been giving me grief from the moment I cast on.
