Beautifully knit cables have drawn crafters to learn how to knit for years. Today let’s learn how to knit cables. At its very basic structure, cables are formed from knitting stitches out of order over several rows. In this tutorial, we will show you how to knit a standard cable stitch, also called a rope cable. We write this in our pattern with a C for cable, the number of stitches that will be a part of the cable (in this tutorial, we are knitting 4), and F or B for where we will hold the stitches; all together it will look like C4F or C4B, which you would find in the Special Stitches section of Mary Maxim Patterns. If you are working a pattern, make sure to read all stitch instructions thoroughly because they can change slightly depending on the pattern. 

The Rope Cable is a very basic cable; you can knit a standard cable or rope cable over any even number of stitches. You will mostly see this over 4 or 6 stitches, but it’s not uncommon to see it over more. In this tutorial, we are working a C4F and a C4B, so we will rearrange our stitches two stitches at a time. There are so many possibilities when cabling, but they all come down to rearranging the order of the stitches on the needle and how many rows you work before you rearrange them. In this tutorial, we are rearranging the order of our stitches every 4th row, which in cable knitting is called our Cable Row. Notice that the 4 stitches our cable is worked over is knit in Stockinette Stitch and are anchored on both sides by a purl stitch. This gives our cable wonderful stitch definition. In between the cable stitches, we worked the moss stitch as in this knit beanie tutorial, but the purl stitch is also common. Notice that we used stitch combinations that don’t have a lot of stretch to them. Stretchy stitches in between cables can cause cable flair, so it’s best to be comfortable using the purl stitch or moss stitch before experimenting. 

You may be asking yourself what is Cable Forward and Cable Back. This is referring to where you hold the cable needle when you are rearranging stitches. If you hold the cable needle to the front, then the twist of your cable needle is going to slant from left to right. If you hold your cable to the back then the twist of your cable stitches will do the opposite and slant from right to left.

You’re ready to go, now what do you need to give this a try? Start with some scrap yarn, a set of needles, they can be straight, DPNs or circular, and a cable needle. You can purchase a special cable needle that usually has a curve or sometimes has notches in it to keep the stitches in place. If you are just starting out, I recommend using a single DPN that is a size smaller than the set you cast on with. I have also seen knitters use stitch markers, paper clips, or just slipped their stitches on and off their needles when they were in a pinch, without a cable needle and everything came out just fine.