Learn to Knit Cables with These Basic Patterns

Cable knitting is, to me, more of a winter project, but I don’t really know why. I guess I associate cables with big, warm sweaters covered in cable patterns (even though I’ve never knit one of those) so they feel like something you should want to make in the winter. But the truth is, cables are for all times of year.

Cable knitting is a technique that seems complicated until you know how it works. Cables are made by working stitches out of order from the way they are presented on the needle. To make that work, you hold some stitches temporarily (on a cable needle or spare double-pointed knitting needle) then you work some stitches from the left hand needle, then you work the stitches from the cable needle.

Whether those stitches were held to the back of the front, how the stitches of the cable and the stitches around them are worked (knit or purl) and how often the cable is twisted determine how a cable looks. So just like regular knitting can do a lot of things with just knit and purl stitches, cables can look a lot of different ways just by changing up a few basic moves.

If you’ve never knit cables before, it’s a great idea to start with some swatches of basic cables before embarking on a cabled project.

This post from Handy Little Me includes eight basic cables, including cables worked on 4 or 6 stitches and twisted to the right or left, a 12-stitch cable you might see called staghorn cable, and one she calls cells that you might find elsewhere called a honeycomb cable.

Once you’ve worked a few of these with cables turned in different directions, you’ll be ready to take on some cable knitting projects. I love a project like this hat as a first cable project because there’s only a little bit of cabling to do, or check out this collection of skill-building cable knitting patterns.

[Photo: Handy Little Me]

When I was looking around for free knitting patterns to share recently, I came across this fun leopard print wrap from Yarnspirations.

This fun bulky wrap gives you tons of practice with instarsia and makes a bold statement while keeping you warm. It’s rated for intermediate knitters and the design is charted but pretty easy to follow. And it’s only 50 rows and worked in bulky yarn, so it wouldn’t even take that long to knit. (You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.)

So what’s the problem? The yarn that the pattern calls for has been discontinued, and it’s not a yarn that a substitute for immediately springs to mind.

The original yarn was Patons Alpaca Blend, a single ply bulky yarn that was a combination of acrylic, superwash wool, nylon and alpaca.

My first thought was Lion Brand Hue + Me, which is an acrylic and wool blend, with two plies instead of a single. It looks like it has the colors you would need to make this fun shawl.

But as I was thinking about it, I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce you to YarnSub if you don’t already know about it. This website is a giant database of yarn that can consider the qualities of the yarn you want to substitute and offer potential substitutions.

It’s not only thinking about yarn weight, like I was, but also fiber content, number of plies, gauge and even the difference in yardage between one ball and another. It even looks at the price and can be filtered by your price range or preferences about fiber content (if, say, you’re sensitive or allergic to wool, for example, or don’t want to you acrylic).

When I plugged in Alpaca Blend, it gave me a lot of different options, though many of them were self-striping or multicolored, which wouldn’t work for this project, and I don’t see a way to filter for solid colors only.

Still, it’s a good tool to give you some ideas you might not know about or might have forgotten about, and it tells you how the new yarn is similar to the old one and how it differs, allowing you to make smarter choices when substituting yarns.

[Photo: Yarnspirations]

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