Thursday, July 2, 2009

Crazy for cables

One of the unmentionable, not to say unspeakable, projects I want to get designing this month has cables on it, so I've been looking at lots of traditional forms and thinking about making up some clever shapes of my own.

I looooove cables, though I am wary now of using just any old style. I knit a sweater featured in the fall/winter 1985 issue of Vogue Knitting with cables that traveled over the entire front and back and... well, it squished together when I knit it and stretched out super wide when I blocked it. Totally unwearable. I tend to stick with formulas that fill no more than 18-24 stitches now.

That said, it is a very cheering thing for me to look at Jared Flood's beautiful cabled gloves (as well as his Druid Mittens, which are visible in his lineup of awesome patterns on the right column of his blog.) I think I would mess up the tension even on something that traveled such a narrow width as the back of my hand, but ohhhh. So lovely.

2 comments:

Kathleen Taylor said...

When you're designing cables: it's swatch swatch swatch. You simply can't predict the elasticity in a new design- sometimes they stretch, sometimes they don't.

I hate swatching.

Mary Keenan said...

Swatching swatching swatching, keep those swatches rolling...

The upside of swatching is that you can do it in an evening, and then use it for a pocket later on. This is what I'm telling myself now, pre-swatching ;^)