Cable Crossing Correction

In my last post, I told you about my plans for correcting a wrongly crossed cable in the sleeve of my sweater-in-progress.  First I thought I’d try just unraveling the columns of stitches for the incorrect crossing, fix the crossing, then knit them back up again.  If that didn’t work, I would just pull out all of the knitting above the point of the incorrect crossing and knit the entire upper part of the sleeve again.

How did it go, you ask?  Pretty well!  Let me show you what I did.  (Warning: Some people may be sickened by the following.  Especially new knitters and those opposed to ripping out their own hard work.  Continue at your own risk.  It might help to have a glass of wine handy.)

I located the column of four stitches (half of the 4×4 cable crossing) that I wanted to target and followed them up the sleeve to the bind off row.  I then picked out the bind off and put these stitches back onto the needles.

That’s the four target stitches on the needle in the middle, with the surrounding stitches held on the other two needles in the background.

Deep breath!  Here’s where things start to make some folks a little woozy.

I then removed the middle needle and reinserted it at a point a little further down the column of stitches – being careful to capture those same four stitches.  I carefully unraveled the rows above the new needle location.

See how the loose yarn is kept just to those four stitches, all the way up the column?  That’s the plan!  It’s because I still have the surrounding stitches locked into place by the needles in the background – the surrounding stitches won’t unravel as long as those stitches are held in place.

I kept moving the middle needle, reinserting it a bit further down the column of four stitches, and unraveling the stitches above until I got to the spot where the stitches crossed the wrong way in the cable.

Looks like a noodly mess, right?  No worries, though, things are working perfectly.

At this point, I corrected the crossing and began knitting my way back up the column of four stitches.  I triple checked every cable crossing I came to, just to make sure that I wasn’t correcting one mistake only to make another.  When I got back up to the top, I bound off the stitches again.

There you have it!  Not so bad, was it?  The new stitches are just a tad wonky, but should even out in blocking without too much trouble.  I am pretty happy with how (relatively) easy that was to fix!

Now if I can just keep from mis-crossing any of the cables in the sweater body…