Monthly Archives: January 2014

One of the strong visual elements to the Blackberry Cabled Cardigan is the aptly-named blackberry stitch.

This bumpy stitch pattern, which resembles the surface of a blackberry, gives the cardigan a strongly textured fabric and helps frame the beautiful cables that run the length of the back, front panels, and sleeves.

The blackberry stitch isn’t for everyone though.  A quick look at some of the other completed cardigans on Ravelry demonstrates that some knitters have made modifications to this stitch.  Some have opted to use a less textured stitch pattern, such as seed stitch or double-seed stitch, where others chose to eliminate the blackberry stitch altogether, replacing it with plain stockinette.

Personally, I like the texture of the blackberry stitch, but I did make a slight modification in how I actually produced the stitch.

The way pattern is written, the blackberry stitch is worked on the wrong side of the fabric, while all of the cables and sweater shaping are worked on the right side of the fabric.  This means that there are no “mindless” rows, no rows where you simply follow the stitch pattern from the previous row.  You have to pay attention to the cables while stitching on the right side, and then pay attention to the blackberry stitch on the wrong side.  That is a lot of thinking and paying attention, especially if you, like me, like to knit while doing other activities.

As a result, I modified the berry stitch so that it is worked on right side rows instead, and it has worked out beautifully.  (For more information on how I altered the stitch, you can visit my project page on Ravelry.)

Now, lest you think I am completely brilliant, I must confess that this was not my idea.  I totally copied this modification off of another Ravelry user.   Because Ravelry’s robust search feature allows you to search other people’s finished projects and filter results for those other people have found helpful, it is relatively easy to see how other people have modified the patterns and how to make those modifications yourself.   When I found the suggested modification, I made sure to link to it from my own project page and to mark it as helpful.  This gives the original knitter the credit for the idea and helps other knitters working on this sweater to know what I found useful.

 PS.  As you can see, I am having a heck of a time photographing the Junebug colorway in a consistent manner.  I’ll keep working on it.

Cris lives in bucolic western Kentucky with her husband, two children, and a menagerie of assorted four-legged creatures.  She spends her days as a librarian and her nights dreaming of a small plot of land where she could raise a few chickens.  She be found on Ravelry as Flarkin.