Cheating

Here's the Bea cable, both on some practice yarn and the real deal:
When I was having trouble with it last week, I took the wretched cable pattern to knitting group for commiseration and advice. When I got to knitting this Wednesday, the ever-helpful Claire, our knitting instructor, confirmed that (a) the pattern was hard to follow (this book's a joy to browse through, but a pain to read - gray font and small charts - ick!) and (b) it didn't work. She had even redrawn the chart by hand, but to no avail. Claire then told me this great story about when she had written to Julia Child because she couldn't get one of Child's recipes to come out right. The chef wrote back to say that she had "cheated" with the recipe, i.e. it really only worked if you used a specific kind of flour from a certain supplier with such-and-such gluten content, etc. Claire suspected some similar fudging was going on with the pattern.

So I contacted Rowan for help, particularly with how to handle the decrease rows. Those kinda leave you hanging, since you have to start in the middle of a cable. Their advice was to knit the extra half-cable thingie (my words, not theirs of course) at the start of the row as plain stocking stitch, then cabling. I guess you could just call it going off pattern for a stitch before resuming the cable. Yup. Cheating.