Cable, Cable...and Cable (it's from South Pacific!)

So yesterday I bought "Ready Set Knit Cables" and today, armed with size 13s, a cable needle and some Encore Chunky, I set out to knit my first cables. It was so much fun! At first I just followed the line by line directions, knitting and purling in perfect obedience, but after I got the gist of the pattern, I started forcing myself to look only at the chart so I could learn to read charts. The hardest part for me, and this will seem really dumb, probably because it is really dumb, was figuring out which was the wrong and right side of the work! I finally got the trick of noticing where the beginning thread tail was (in line with first stitch, RIGHT SIDE!) and memorizing that odd numbers on the chart were also RIGHT SIDE. (You'll be happy to know I did not make up any kind of gang hand symbol to accompany this knowledge.)By the second cable I was getting it! I actually got into the rhythm of the pattern and just had to check myself with the chart now and then.

Towards the end I looked back over the road I had traveled and noticed that I had made a couple of mistakes along the way. I'm actually more proud of this than the whole cabling extravaganza--I corrected my mistakes by putting the stitches around them on stitch holders, letting the stitches run down to the error and REKNITTING all the way up!!! This is such an accomplishment for me!

So I'm feeling all sassy and whoop, I did it, yay me! Oh, and for those of you have haven't seen it in a while, that illumination on the photograph is SUNSHINE!