So I’m working on a thing with cables every eight rows, which means I often find myself thinking huh, is it time to do the next cable yet? But counting rows on cables can be…not immediately obvious.

But don’t worry, there’s a trick to it. As usual, the thing to do is…learn to look at your fabric. I know. I know! It’s annoying. But it’s the way you actually start to understand what’s going on, so it’s pretty much always going to be the answer.

Ok, so, cables happen when you yoink one set of stitches over across some neighboring stitches. And that yoinking makes holes. Not holes like ‘ack, my fabric is coming apart.’ Just holes like ‘oh, yeah, these stitches cross, and there’s some space left when they do that.’

Look at this fabric and see if you can see the two holes along the side of the cable.

I’ll mark them out here in yellow, but if you couldn’t see them in the first picture, do scroll back up and look at it again and see if you can find them now that you know where to look (that’s the looking at your fabric bit, you have to train your eye to see these things).

And just to make it super obvious, here it is with my fingers in there to really hold them open.

Ok, so, once you can find those holes alongside your cables, you can easily tell how many rows it’s been since the last time you worked a cable cross. All you have to do is count the strands of yarn above the hole. So let’s look closely at those strands.

The first strand, the one riiiight on top of the hole (the one my fingernail could touch if I wiggled my bottom finger a bit) is the one that got laid down as you were working the row with the cable in it. I’m going to paint that one pink just so I can be sure we’re all looking at the same spot.

That strand is from the cable row itself. That bit of yarn got there there as you worked the cable row. Think of that as strand zero…the strand that happened when you made the cables. As you keep working, each time you work another row, you add another strand.

See if you can count how many strands are between my fingers in the photo above. Start with the pink one as zero, and don’t miss the one right under my top finger, it’s in shadow a little bit.

I’ll color them in here, just because again, looking closely at this stuff is how you learn to read your fabric. If you didn’t see all of those the first time, scroll back up and look at it again and see if you can find them now that you know where to look.

So if you ever want to know how many rows you’ve worked after the cable row, you just count the strands above strand zero. Because each new row lays down a new strand. So if you count the strands (starting with zero for the one you worked as you worked the cable row), you’ll know how many rows you’ve worked.

On this pattern, I work the cable crosses every eight rows. That means I need to work the row with the cable cross, then seven plain rows.  So if I count that out, here’s what it would look like.

The one labeled zero got there when I did the first cable cross. Each of the other strands happened on subsequent rows.

So whenever I’m wondering ‘hey, is it time for a cable row?’ I just find the hole, and count the strands on top of the hole, starting with zero (because the strand right on top of the hole got there when I worked the last cable, and each strand on top of that happened as I worked one more row).

It’s easy. It doesn’t require me to own, locate, or remember to use a row counter. And it works! If you want to see a video version of me talking about something similar, you can find that over here.