Cable fun and Fixes, too

Do you remember when you were in school?  You studied, read, made notes and wore out your brain doing the assignments.  Then, to give your brain a rest -- and thinking you deserved it -- you picked up a novel, or celebrity mag/rag, or maybe even the newspaper.

Knitting's like that, especially this Master Knitter Designation thing for me.  I read instructions, cast on, knit, follow the instructions, knit, bind off (cast off) and call it 'good to go.'  Then, like school, I decide to check my work and discover  I can't turn this in for anybody to see; it's wrong.


So here's my treat to myself -- Swatch 13, a simple cable stitch.  Though I confess I'm challenged with  (or over thinking?) the instructions.  It says to repeat the 4 rows in the pattern til the swatch is 4 inches long.  I'd rather knit another row so I don't have to finish with the cable, but they said 4 inches.  So 4 inches is what they'll get.  Here tis, along with a close-up so you can see the cable, which looks like a heavy rope, or 'line' in marine language.

Running up the middle of the swatch is a cable.
It's made by actually twisting the stitches as you knit.
You store a few on a separate little needle, called a cable hook.
Then you knit a couple of stitches from the left needle and
then you back-track and knit the stitches from the little hook.

A close-up of the cable.

But before I had fun with the cable, I fixed two of the swatches that were wrong.  And -- major groan -- i went back to check my work, like a good student, and -- yes -- discovered a couple of other swatches that are now on my do-over list.  

Here's the new Swatch 10, next to the wrong one.  The wrong one has holes running directly up a diagonal , one right after the other.  The corrected swatch 10 has a steeper slope for the line of holes.  And it's longer.

Correct Swatch 10 on the left.
Error message on the right.

Fixed Swatch 4, too.  The swatch error looks a bit like a tea-cup.  The corrected swatch looks more like a mug.  Hoping you can see the difference.  

Tea-cup (error) on the left.
Nice tall mug (corrected Swatch 4) on the right.

Again I wish there was a place to put a weather icon.  Today is glorious.  I hope to take advantage of the sunshine to do another bamboo picture shoot with a work-in-progress.  Took a nice long walk and enjoyed the bright sun on my face.  Seems like I'm always ready to walk just a little farther if the sun is shining.

Another life lesson, perhaps?  When life is good, we seem ready to face it and keep moving; it's the rainy days that make us stumble.