Cable Knitting For Beginners

Cable knitting is a wonderful way to add texture and beauty to knitwear, but it can seem pretty daunting for beginners. One of the great things about cabling is that it isn’t nearly as hard as it looks. Today I’m going to demonstrate how to do a cable.

What you’ll need

In order to do cable knitting, you’ll need a few things:

• Yarn
• knitting needles
• a cable needle or a double pointed needle
• a cabling pattern

That’s it, that’s all you need to start cabling.

Cabling Abbreviations

There are many different ways that cabling is abbreviated in knitting, so it can get a little confusing. Usually the pattern will explain what each abbreviation they use means, so always follow the pattern. Sometimes they don’t, and there are two general formulas for cable abbreviations.

C4F – cable 4 forward is a cable abbreviation frequently used, meaning you’ll be cabling 4 stitches and holding the cable needle forward. Most commonly it means 2 stitches over 2 stitches, but that isn’t the only division of stitches that come up to 4. That’s the problem with writing cables this way, it isn’t as clear as it should be.

The other popular way to read/write cables addresses this issue, but can seem a little clunky. 2/2LC – 2 over 2 left cross gives us the same information as C4F, but in a much clearer way. It tells us that we’ll be cabling 2 sts over 2 sts, and that the cable will be left leaning (or held in front). This becomes really helpful when you’re cabling 4 stitches in an uneven distribution, like 3 over 1, or adding purls into the cable (like 3/1LPC). It’s for this reason I like to use the #/#C method of writing cables.

Cable Knitting

When you get to the stitches you’ll need to cable, you simply slide the stitches onto a cable needle (for 2/2RC, we’d slide 2 stitches onto our cable needle), hold them in front of the work for a left cable or in back of the work for a right cable, knit the next stitches required from your needles, slide the stitches on the cable needle back onto the left knitting needle, then knit those stitches. Written out it can seem confusing, so here is a video demonstration of the process.

You want to make sure when you’re sliding the stitches onto your cable needle, you’re sliding them on purl-wise so that the stitches don’t get twisted. Practice doing a few cables on a swatch until you get the hang of it.

Do you already use cabling in your knitting? What’s your favorite abbreviations to use? Let me know in the comments.

Happy knitting!