There are two small mis-crossed cables on the sample garment for my Amelia sweater. I didn’t notice them right away and once I did I had moved on to other projects. So the Amelia sweater went into storage with the other sample garments until this fall when I pulled it out to update the pattern for 2018. While I was taking photographs of the reconfigured neckline, the wrong cables started to bug me and I decided to fix them.
I’ve dropped stitches and reworked them many times over the years. But fixing cabling errors on a finished garment is another matter entirely and not something I’ve done before. First I had to go deep, deep stash diving to find the last bits of the sweater yarn (Valley Yarns Northampton in color 19 Amethyst). I know they still make this very yarn and color but I wanted to find my original. Next I needed resources. A quick google search of “fix knitted cables” finds many good resources. My two favorites are this article from Twist Collective and this video.
My original plan was to fix the two wrong cables in two different ways for a side-by-side comparison using Method 1 and Method 2 from the Twist Collective article I linked above. That didn’t exactly work out.
I tried Method 2 first. I put the two mis-crossed stitches onto a double-pointed needle.
Then I knit one row into the two stitches.
Then I grafted the new stitches to the other side of the cable over the top to make them cross the correct way.
You can see here that it isn’t perfect. But it does look pretty good.
Next I tried Method 1. I wove some waist yarn into the stitches above and below the mis-crossed cable.
Here is where Method 1 ran into trouble for me. This is as close as the scissors got to cutting the center strand of the cable. I just couldn’t make myself cut the stitches. Especially not after the fix using Method 2 turned out pretty nice.
So I gave up and went back corrected the second cable using Method 2. They still aren’t perfect. But I think after I take the time to rearrange the stitches a little bit more, this fix will be completed.
