You know that thing where you’ve done thousands of stitches, a dozen weaved-in color changes, and then you decide the bottom color really just isn’t right? Well, maybe you don’t — but I do. Just look. that’s a lot of stitches, right? I mean, I’m not afraid of frogging, but there’s a limit.

I like the purplish color near the top. Especially since I’m making it for someone whose favorite color is purple. But it really doesn’t go with the dozen rows of the peach color at the bottom. (That’s a bit hard to tell from photos, but believe me, it doesn’t go.)

If you have ever tried to pull out stitches from the bottom, you know what happens. Everything unravels. Each stitch relies on a stitch from the previous row. So it’s impossible, right?

Wrong! The picture of the peach color above is what’s left after I’ve removed it from the bottom. But how?

The big secret is to thread a length of yarn through the legs of the stitches of the bottom row of the color above the piece you want to remove. I know that’s a lot to parse. so here’s a picture.

You can see I have a length of the light purple threaded through the legs of the greenish-white stitches. Leave a relatively long tail (I did about 6 inches), and loosely secure it. You don’t want to accidentally pull it out, ever, but you do want to be able to adjust tension if needed.

Once you’ve done that, you can cut off the top row of stitches from the stripe you want to remove. So I did lose about 10 grams of yarn, but still saved more than 50. Not bad, right?

Then you can stitch into the thread between each stitch. Luckily, the stripe I had can be replaced perfectly since the stitches look the same right side up as upside down. If your stripe doesn’t look right upside-down, you may need to work it up separately and sew it on. I wrote about how to do that here.

And finally, the pièce de résistance — the newly added stitches (right and wrong side):

So I got rid of the color I didn’t want, and was able to save most of the yarn. BTW, the peach color goes perfectly in another project I’m working on. So it won’t even get lost in a yarn stash. I win!