Cable project revealed!

If you watched Monday's video on knitting cables without a cable needle, you already know the secret of what project I was working on.

I needed a fast gift for my son's teacher. She's been really great for him, and she's helped me a lot with a personal project, so I wanted to do something for her. My son said her favorite colors were yellow and green, and I'd seen a picture of her wearing a cabled headband a few years ago. I know she doesn't like hats, so I thought a yellow cabled headband would be a great, fast gift to make for her. (Plus I have a ton of yellow Aran weight yarn.)

If you haven't used Ravelry and its pattern search--you've gotta. I searched for headbands with cables with free patterns online, and I came up with the Evenstar Headband by Jaime Louise, designed to match the Evenstar Gloves by Audrey M. (Here's my project on Ravelry.)

It's a really cool cable pattern--but be sure to follow the pattern! I thought I knew what I was doing the first repetition through, but I messed up about 10 rows and had to frog them. However, even with that set back, it knitted up in one day, blocked the next. Finally got a button yesterday, sewed it on today and sent it off!


My camera was a big smudgy, but the most interesting and unique part of the pattern is the "uncable," where the two cables come close in the middle, and then you actually just wrap the yarn around all those stitches, bundling them together. I've never done that before, and the result works really well in this pattern!

How do you pick thoughtful gifts?

Reversible Cables!

In knitting, one of my favorite design elements are cables. You make a cable by moving some stitches onto another needle and basically knitting them out of order.

But most of the time, cables only look good from the front of the garment. On a sweater, that doesn't really matter (unless you really want to wear it inside out...). But on something like a scarf where you see both sides, you know one of those sides won't look as good.

Unless you can design some reversible cables. And that's exactly why I wanted to try this scarf by Kris Hanson. This was another of my gift scarves, and for this friend I was looking to make something very classy. When I saw the awesome texture on this pattern, I knew I'd found it.

The pattern uses ribbing to make the cables look the same on the front and the back. The middle cable is offset, which makes this really cool ripple effect across the pattern.

I went for a bamboo acrylic blend yarn, which was very soft and had a nice sheen. It might have been just a little bit too soft for this design, since it felt almost a little "mushy."

And here it is all tied up and ready for delivery!

What do you think? What kind of scarf says "you"?