When Cables Go Pear-shaped
Having made my list and checked it twice, so to speak, I could hardly wait to jump into knitting Campbell’s Aran. Planning and noodling have their charms, but they’re not knitting, ya know? Due diligence done, there’s a point after which one can’t predict every possible happenstance. I’m always happy, then, when it’s finally time to settle down and play with string in a meaningful way.
Above is the view from my lap, a few inches away from my provisional cast on. There is more to be said on the what and why of that choice, but for now we’ll just call it a deplorable excess of Start-itis. I wanted to crack straight on with the sweater back, and lower edge treatment be damned.
Somewhere about halfway through the first 32-row repeat, I experienced a sinking feeling. The honeycomb panels adjacent to the center felt stiffer than was strictly necessary. And I wasn’t loving how fiddly the stitch pattern was, calling for all those 2-over-2 crosses on every right side row. Spreading out the sweater back to re-measure and “admire” my work, I admitted to myself that I really didn’t like those honeycomb panels at all. In addition to the other issues, they were too close to the same scale as the filler mini-honeycombs at the sides.
How, after all of that swatching to audition cables for knitability and scale, did I make such a glaring error? I unearthed the honeycomb swatch to look at it again, compared with what was happening in my lap:
Can you guess, Gentle Readers, what happened? How about now?
That’s right. After swatching the honeycomb not once, but twice, and finding it worthy, I failed to knit the pattern I had chosen. Instead of working the cable crosses every fourth row, as God intended, I was working them every other row. No wonder it was fiddly, and dense, and small!
Come to think of it, I’ve known PEOPLE who were fiddly, dense and small because they were crossed too often, and I didn’t much like them either.
In my fit of Start-itis, I had been so focused on following the charts I combined to get my pretty center cable that I never even bothered to look at my honeycomb swatch. Which could only mean one thing, of course:
Surgical Intervention. I still don’t know if it would have been faster to operate on it like this or to frog it and start over. I told myself that the surgical route would only require re-knitting 2,560 stitches, while a total do-over would call for 6,400. But of course, any decision that causes me to resort to math is probably already a bad one.
Heed, Gentle Readers, the lesson of our forbears: Those who do not study their swatches are destined to repeat them.