Time Whiner Cable

I love knitting cables. Especially cables involving only two stitches -- so easy to do without a separate cable needles. I love seeing the little lines twist and weave themselves over and under their neighbors into beautiful patterns. It's quite magical.

But it takes freakin' forever. The circumference of this sweater is 304 stitches, which is quite a few, but I don't think it's the number of stitches slowing me down, it's the unevenness of complexity amongst the cable charts and the fact that they will never line up(see previous post). No single round on this entire sweater (besides the waist, neck and arm bands) is identical. I haven't even finished one repeat of the largest chart yet.

One row might have only a few cables in each chart with many purls and ktbls, making the round fly by in only 15 minutes. The next round might take an hour as I try to read the charts, twisting stitches constantly, and getting distracted by podcasts/music/TV. I'm not complaining. Okay, I am complaining -- but I complain because I love. This is turning out quite nicely so far. I would estimate that I'm about 1/4 of the way to where the neck steek begins. Then things should really get interesting!

It's getting large enough that it's making me sweat while I knit it. Our heat index is in the upper 90s, today, and I have to take breaks every once in a while even though the AC is blasting. I should still be working on this when Jeff and I head out to Big Bend National Park for several days of hiking and general end-of-the-semester decompression -- oh, and knitting. I just checked their forecast, and it looks like the high Wednesday (about a week before we'll get there), the high is predicted to be 108. Woo-hoo!