Tips & Tricks for Devious Knitters: Cables That Don’t Flare
Way long ago when I was just a baby knitter, I made a Down Under sweater for my oldest son.
Here’s the sweater in question, modeled not by my older son, nor even my younger son, but by my cousin’s son, Ben, because I decided that what should be done with handknits after my kids outgrew them was to give them away. All of them.
At the time that seemed like a brilliant idea. It freed up space in the drawers and the handknits would get extra wearings. Back when I was being run ragged by two precocious young boys, I did not put any thought into the idea that there might someday be GRANDCHILDREN who could wear those sweaters. (Note: There are not yet grandchildren, nor any hint of such. But my kids are probably closer now to being dads than they are to fitting into those sweaters.) Oh, well. Ben seemed really happy to have this sweater. Maybe his mom was smarter than I and tucked it away somewhere for her future grandchildren.
The sweater was a great first cable project. It was quick to knit, it looked great, and, well, sure, the cables flared out at the bottom and shoulder seams. “Oh, well,” I told myself. “It’s a shame that cables just do that and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Because really, if there were something you could do about that, wouldn’t all the patterns tell you? Um, no. They do not. The cables don’t have to flare but the patterns don’t tell you how to make it be so.
Cables flare at the start and end of the fabric because there’s nothing pulling them inward. Throughout the rest of the fabric, you’ve got the cable crosses providing inward tension. Every cable pattern I’ve come across starts and ends with the middle rows, the ones farthest from the cross. So of course, they flare.
It’s quite easy to prevent the flare, though, by reducing the number of stitches you have in your cast-on and bind-off rows (or whatever the beginning and end of your cable pattern is, if it starts or stops somewhere other than the edge of the fabric).
In the Skylark sweater I’m currently knitting I cast on fewer stitches for each cable, then increased in the second row to achieve the correct number of stitches called for in the pattern.
When I reached the top of the cable section, I decreased two stitches in the center of each cable in the row before the change to stockinette stitch.
As a rule of thumb, for each cable that you want to shrink you can decrease away the number of stitches that is crossed over in that cable. For a 2×2 cable, you would decrease away two stitches from each cable. In a 3×3 cable you could decrease three stitches. In a 4×2 cable, you would only decrease two, as that’s the number of stitches you’re crossing over.
If I were decreasing more than two stitches from the center of each cable, I would space out those decreases over two rows. Just make sure the decreases happen in rows that are still within the cable.
Give it a try on your next cable project, and let me know how it goes.
