Oh boy...

It's fun! Everyone loves unwinding and restarting a project! Everyone! I'm telling you, THEY LOVE IT OK, AND SO DO I! (distressed panting dissolving into over exaggerated sobbing). It hurts, why me? Why? What did I do to make life this painful?

Even the baby from the internet is confused and upset.

But in all seriousness unwinding is one of the worst parts of knitting. It isn't that bad when it's only a couple of rows, a couple of stitches is even better. Actually, undoing stitches without ever taking the piece off of the needles is called "tinking" because you are knitting backwards. But there are times when tinking will just take too long. When this happens it's time to slide the stitches off the kneedles and pull the yarn. to yank out the rows. This is a step that scares many new knitters.

Yes, this is a knitted version of the scream.

The main worry I've heard is "what if I can't stop at the right point?" The answer: you re-do any extra stitches that you take out, and you slow down when you get close to your stopping point.

This is all well and good, but what about an entire project? 

That hurts. It's painful to do, and to decide.

Context time:

I made the decision approximately halfway through the test knit of a pattern to unwind the entire thing and redesign it. Nothing major, I simply wasn't happy with an element of it. That element happened to be at the very beginning of the piece. After fighting with myself I figured out that I wouldn't be satisfied if I didn't go back and rework this thing. So I began to unwind it, rolling the yarn back onto the ball. Now I've restarted it, and I'm redesigning that part. I'm glad I did it, because I'd rather have to do some extra work and have something that I like, than slack off and be disappointed...it still kind of sucked though.