Next steps - Cabling

After my attempt with the beret, I thought I'd try to learn actual techniques, and work on increasing my skill - while still working on pieces I found pretty. First technique I chose was cabling. And my project was this afghan. Its a very pretty piece, if large, but I thought it'd give me lots of practice. Boy was I right. The pattern has two separate cable sections - one for the x's and o's, and one for the big braid. And while that shouldn't be a big deal, the x's and o's pattern repeat after 16 rows, while the big braid takes 24 rows. Required some serious focusing on my part just to remember what row I was on for each pattern!

That's when I found this iphone app - JKnit! Its a pattern project assistant that lets you input the pattern row by row, and helps you keep track of where you are. By extending the pattern repeats until the two patterns met up again as they did at the start (48 rows later), I was able to track exactly where I was in both patterns as I went row by row. Yay for technology.

So far, I'm almost done with a full set of the double repeat (on the big braid).. something like row 44 ( a little further than this picture shows). At this point, I put the afghan away in favor of starting up smaller projects that would turn into gifts. The afghan is still sitting in the bottom of my project bag waiting for some attention. And I plan to get back to it.. I just keep coming up with new projects I want to work on! But now that the holiday knitted-gifts are out of the way, maybe I can put some more love into this afghan.