Cables

I have actually finished the Article of Doom, so I spent today doing things like attending to the sink full of dirty dishes and procuring actual food with actual nutritional value. But I'm still pondering the second sweater. I think I'm going to put these cables on a modified Central Park Hoodie:



That's not my swatch. Actually, someone won a contest with that swatch, and it's easy to see why. It's awesome, which is why I'm going to try to copy it. The central six-stranded cable is a Saxon Braid, and it's not hard to find charts for it. I originally fell in love with it when I checked Barbara Walker's third treasury out from the library, and there are versions of it floating around the internet. But I haven't been able to find a chart for the four-stranded cable, so tonight I decided to try to work it out for myself. Boy, did that not work. I realize that I actually don't totally understand how cables work. I have only done really simple cables, with no purl stitches in between the knit bits. I haven't entirely internalized how you make the cable turn, rather than cross another strand of the cable. I understand it in theory: it's the same as crossing a strand, except that you cross a purl stitch rather than a knit one. But I still can't quite wrap my head around it enough to figure out how to make it work. I think I'm going to try to swatch up the Saxon Braid and see if that makes things clearer for me.

This may all be overly ambitious. It's possible that I should make a bunch of Saxon Braid dishcloths before I attempt a complicated cable on a sweater. I will report back on this after I have attempted to do a swatch.