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Kathy Zimmerman is a knitwear designer with 20 years of experience and says cables are her favorite. She's even know as the cable queen. She shares some of her tips and tricks and the process of working through two of her projects in the Knitting Daily Workshop "Classic to Creative Knit Cables" DVD.

The 66-minute DVD starts with Zimmerman showing some of the many cabled designs from Zimmerman's books and other collections.


She explains a bit about the inspiration for some of the projects and what goes into those patterns. The emphasis in the program is on her Deep Creek Scarf and Princess Cable Sweater, which use the same cables and are available for download free with purchase of the DVD.

Cable Basics

Zimmerman explains that cables are usually worked in Stockinette Stitch on a background of Reverse Stockinette or another textured stitch (these projects use ribbing) that helps the cable pop. Though she starts out with a basic six-stitch cable (three stitches passed over three stitches) she notes that even the most complex-looking cable stitches are formed with the same basic maneuvers.

She talks about the tools that are needed to make cables and suggests using a double-pointed needle instead of a regular cable needle (she uses a five-inch plastic needle) because it's sharper and a little easier to work with. She also transfers the cable stitches back to the left-hand needle before working them rather than knitting them off the cable needle.

She says this stretches them less than working from the cable needle.

Whatever tool you use as a cable needle, she advises using a tool one or two sizes smaller than the working needles to make it easy to slip the stitches.

She goes into detail on how to read and follow cable charts and offers tips for keeping track of where you are and what you need to do in a particular row.

She uses many different colors of highlighters to color-code her pattern stitch key and the corresponding cables on the chart so it's easy to see what needs to be done where and how to do it.

Knitting the Patterns

Zimmerman shows how to knit the scarf in a lot of detail; the sweater uses mostly the same patterns so that section is a lot shorter. She demos each of the different cable stitches that are used in the pattern, and this takes a long time and requires working back across a lot of plain rows in between.

It can be difficult to come up with things to talk about when working plain knitting (though she does share stories about Aran knitting and the inspiration behind the pattern), but there are some quiet times in the DVD when it would have been nice to have some commentary or background music, or simply to have skipped ahead in the project.

Eventually some of the pattern is skipped, which helps, but the instruction still moves very slowly. That's great for someone who's new to cables, but if you have some experience, you might want to skip some of this.

Even so, the DVD is full of good tips such as how to make stitches more even on the edges of cables and how to fix mistakes in cables.

If you want some hand-holding to get you through the basics of learning to knit cables and following complex charts, "Classic to Creative Knit Cables" with Kathy Zimmerman is a great way to learn. Knitters with a bit of skill might find the instruction a little boring, but there are still good tips here for knitters of all skill levels.

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