Gratuitous Cabley Goodness

*sings* IIIIII love cables! (duh duh-duh duh duh, duh-duhduh) IIIIIII love caaaables…

Hnuhwah? Oh, hi. The cable invasion is going well. I had a lot of fun picking the cables I would use, and was really pleased to find two 8-row cables to flank the 16-row Celtic Braid (it keeps things tidy). At first I had a harder time making the cables with my yarn of choice (wool-ease) as it’s more loosely twisted and much splitty-er than the RHSS I learned to cable on. (The loose twist was much less annoying to crochet with than it is to knit with, by the way.) But I plugged through until I started to get better with it – after all, this project was planned, in part, as a way to get rid of the two skeins of wool-ease in the wrong dye lot that I picked up while trying to get all the yarn for Genevieve. Well, once I had it, I didn’t see any reason to tack it back . . . I’m a packrat, you know. Not a bad packrat. I’m much better than I used to be. I just hang onto, put away, and organize things that might be useful in the future.

Case in point, when I got ready to actually cast on for this project, I decided to make a chart to follow. (Go me! Growth, progression, learning, all that.) I thought about how to do it and discarded several options before I remembered a partially used pad of graph paper that I had seen during the recent reorganization of my “craft closet.” I had thought it was from college algebra classes a few years back, but when I unearthed the quarter-pad of purple graph paper, I realized it was from my algebra class my seventh grade year. Oh, dear. You mean that I’ve been hanging on to a quarter-pad of graph paper for nearly a decade? Um, yes. But now I have something to use it on, nyeah! 😛 Anyway, I dug out my set of colored pencils (the box claims they are perfect for emerging artists – thanks mom!) and I even color coded it, which was fun. I enjoyed making my chart, so I’ll show it off.

I cut the paper in half and taped it together so it would be long enough, and even so I eliminated the mirror repeats because it was so huge. Thing about charts, though, is that when you knit, you go from right to left, and when reading, you go from left to right. So reading the chart feels a little dyslexic. Unless you’re supposed to read it the opposite direction that you read it…but that’s a little too much for me. Whew. But here’s how far I’ve gotten: