My son, Geoff, is a professional magician – so I have a little first-hand knowledge of  how complicated it can be to make something look effortlessly impossible.  Really, only another magician can appreciate a magician’s work fully. To the rest of us, it is simply magic!

Knitting is like that too.  A non-knitter watches a knitter and sees a sock or sweater grow off the needles while the knitter seems to make little repetitive jiggly motions with her fingers twined in yarn.  If the knitter is carrying on a conversation or watching a movie, it seems as if it happens without her conscious effort!  Like magic.  And so, it seems, without actual work or knowledge or skill.

So, I appreciated having Sarah sitting beside me and cheering me on as I fixed the braided cables on her sweater the other day.  She had skipped a crossing row several rows down and asked me (because I have more experience “dropping down and fixing cables” – kind of a dubious honor, of course, as it tells you I have had to do it rather a lot!) to set them right.  It meant dropping 6 stitches for 4 rows, doing the braided cable with a crochet hook – i.e., making the stitches with the hook while twisting them into the correct order for the braid effect.  (Sarah gave me the excellent suggestion, by the way, of arranging the stitches on a cable needle to keep them in order)  Then, I had to re-make each stitch all the way up to the current row (a total of 24 stitches per cable).  Fortunately, there were only 2 cables to fix!  So, it did not take more than an hour to do. (It probably would have gone faster if I had not had a bad cold and sinus headache – and the grandbabies had not been marching around the room tooting fabulously shrill musical instruments…).

If you are not a knitter with cable-knitting experience, the description of the process is probably mostly gobbledy-gook!  But, of course, that is the point.  The cables look firm and lovely now – as if they had never been deformed.  And someone non-knitterish  who might have  been looking on while it was done would have only seen me grimacing while poking and twisting a little mess of yarn.  Then, abracadabra, a cable!

Perhaps you saw the Pickles comic strip today (Sunday).  Earl is trying to use telekinesis and explains to his grandson that “Your Gramma is really good at it…Look at her.  She’s knitting a sweater just by using her mind to move her fingers.”

It’s a kind of magic!