Last Saturday, I went on a field trip with my knitting guild to Yarn Rhapsody, in Dawsonville Gainesville, GA. While we were there, I was looking at a cable knit sweater, and I remarked to one of my guild mates about how hard it looked. She looked right at me and said, “It’s so easy, you won’t believe it.”

So Wednesday, I decided to try my hand at it. I went to Youtube, and searched for “cable knitting”, and watched the first video that came up. It’s 8:15, and really showed how easy the technique is. After watching it once, I grabbed some cheap worsted weight yarn, a set of US 6 needles, my row counter, and the cable needle that came with the starter kit I bought a couple of months ago, and started knitting.

The actual cable technique is really simple, but the field surrounding the sample from the video does still require accurate counting. I wasn’t paying attention, and ended up completely screwing it up. I ripped it out an decided to try again, but it was late, so I set it aside until I had more time.

And that’s what I did today after work. The sample in the photos took me about two hours, from start to finish. I’m sure that if you were making something like a sweater, where there are parallel cables, that it would be more difficult than this little swatch, since you’d have to keep more numbers in your head, but the basics are simple.

This was fun to make. Here’s the album.

I got the book Sensational Knitted Socks, by Charlene Schurch, from my local public library. In this book, Ms. Schurch explains the basics of sock knitting, including the parts of a sock, and the various techniques involved in creating them. The first project is what she calls a “class sock”; that is, the sock that she teaches first when she is teaching a knitting class. It’s much smaller than a regular sock, but has all the constituent parts: cuff, leg, heel flap, heel turn, gusset, foot, and toe. You cast on 32 stitches across four DPNs (double-pointed needles), five DPNs, or two sets of circular needles; less than half of what I would need for a sock for myself. I chose to use the four DPNs.

I’ve now knitted three of this sock. The first I did over several days spanning the last two weeks. I would make really good progress, and then something catastrophic would happen. Mostly this involved counting stitches only to discover too many, or too few, in such a way that the pattern was destroyed. Once or twice one of the needles slipped out, and before I could stop it, multiple stitches were heading for the hills. I corrected several problems, but in many cases, it was easier, and more aesthetically pleasing, just to unravel the whole thing and start over. The last time I started that first sock turned out to be the charm, and it took me about ten hours to finish it. It was decent, but had a glaringly obvious purl-where-it-should-have-been-knit row, which I didn’t notice until about ten rows ahead of it.

Lessons learned from this sock:

• be fanatical about counting stitches
• be fanatical about checking each row, to ensure the pattern is intact

I was able to do the second sock, from start to finish, in about five hours on Saturday.  The only real issue with this one was a small gap on each side of the gusset. This is a common problem when knitting socks. The biggest accomplishment with this sock was that once I started, I didn’t have to start over. And I knitted where I was supposed to knit, and purled where I was supposed to purl.

I started the third sock on Sunday, and was making fantastic progress, when I got distracted, lost count, lost a stitch, had it escape as I tried to fix it, and ended up unraveling and starting over. I got through the heel turn last night, and then resumed tonight. After a couple of hours, I was finished. I didn’t make any further errors, and it looks like it matches the second one.

Next, I’ll be moving on to an actual pair of socks, that I will actually wear.

You can see the full album at Flickr.