This book and its enclosed designs were born from the usual place – when a designer looks at something she or he has looked at many times before, but now sees something new and says, “what if I did this…”

That’s just what I did. I flipped through one of my stitch dictionaries, stopping to admire a cable which I had admired every time I looked through this this particular dictionary - the Double Knot cable.

Its beauty always caught my eye, and knew that one day I’d use the cable in a design. But this time, when I looked at it and began to wonder how I would use the cable, I thought that the cable looked great on its own.

All those purl background stitches seemed unnecessary, and I thought they actually detracted from the beautiful curves of the cable.
So, I copied the chart to graph paper, without the surrounding purl stitches, and began to figure out how I could decrease and add stitches, to keep to the pure cable form.

I then used the chart in a scarf design. This first exploration into shaping cables led me to write this book.

The shaped cable explorations in this book use cable patterns from Barbara Walker’s Charted Knitting Designs, A Third Treasury of Knitting Patterns and Lesley Stanfield’s The New Knitting Stitch Library.

Other dictionaries show stitch patterns in text form. This is not to say that cable patterns from these dictionaries couldn’t be used, but they would need to be put into charted form first, before one could work on their shaping.

The book begins with a how-to and is followed by six designs that use shaped cables. Feel free to use the shaped cable idea as a jumping-off point for your own designs!

Bag with crocheted body and strap, and knit cabled border.
4.25 sts and 4.5 rows = 1” in sc with size H hook.

Uses 2 / 3 hanks Galooboy Blue (MC), 1 hank Negotiation Grey (CC)

This pattern is part of my Curvaceous Cables book, with 5 other patterns and a how-to on shaping cables.

Happy Knitting!
Dawn