With my apologies to Robert Burns, it’s time for another knitting post. Today I need to talk about my terrible addiction to that most notorious drug of sweater and sock knitters – the cable.

I love cables. They are fun to knit, they look really impressive when you’ve done a long chain of them, and most importantly, they aren’t half as tricky as the rest of the knitting world would have you believe. (Actually that last secret is true of knitting as a whole. I shall have to do a post on breaking the great secret of knitting – that’s it’s all easy – open for all of you.) It’s not even math, like some elements of knitting, it’s just counting. I don’t even do the counting in my head – I have a stitch counter on my iPhone that I can set to count for me. I color code my cables on the needle, then label a row on my counter for each cable. When I increment the whole project one row, each of the cables increments on their own counting system, so I always know where I am. Easy Peasy, Lemon Squeezy.

There’s a problem to loving cables, though. Once you realize how easy they are, the tendency is to start putting them on everything. Like a flame paint-job on a car, cables work best with a little restraint. A thin line down the side of a kilt stocking is okay. A twenty-stitch wide knotwork probably doesn’t belong on a footie-slipper. It’s the knitting equivalent of getting a sweet flame paint scheme on your ’82 Omni. You can do it, but even ironically it looks a little off.

Okay, back to trying to figure out how to put triangular knotwork on the earflaps of a hat.

Tags: I can stop cabling any time I want, Knitter Pride, knitting, my methods, obsession

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 18th, 2010 at 1:00 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.