Get on a Roll with Bold Brioche Cables!
I’ve been overseeing a few brioche courses lately and my tendency for bad puns seems to grow with each release. What’s also growing is my fascination with brioche knitting. Basic brioche stitch is beautifully textured, and the hallmark deep ribbing begs to be squeezed. But squeezy and delicious as brioche knitting is, what if you want to gild the lily and up the oomph of your project x 5? Well then, you may want to consider working brioche cables.
Brioche is often worked to create “flat” or “faux” cables; working increases and decreases makes brioche ribs shift over and creates an illusion of cableness. But brioche can accommodate “true” cables as well, where stitches cross over one another as in traditional Aran cable stitches. In the highest technical terms, these cables make brioche more brioche-y and cables more cable-y; the extreme textures of each get amped up even more when combined.
Our newest course, Bold Brioche Cables with Faina Goberstein, delves into cables with élan, and aplomb. First, Faina demonstrates how to work a basic brioche cable while laying out the ground rules (an even number of stitches only, if you please). Things get really interesting when she shows how to take a cable—any cable—and translate it into brioche. Because of brioche’s unique structure, a simple apples-to-apples conversion looks a bit congested, as you can see in the second swatch of the photo below.
The secret to converting cables into brioche is giving them room to open up and breathe (i.e. adding more stitches and rows to your repeats)—for really beautiful and impressive results. Think about that shriveled root-bound plant in your office that’s been gamely hanging on to life for years: give it a larger pot and all at once it becomes bigger, bushier, and happier looking.
But that’s not all! You probably already know the wow factor of 2-color brioche . . . now imagine it applied to cables which, you realize, are completely reversible. Some cables are a true mirror image, while others have strikingly different sides, resulting in a unique effect. Faina shows how to covert basic braid and traveling cables into 2-color brioche, which is one heck of a tool to have in your toolbox.
Learn all about brioche cables, and feel incredibly clever for doing so, by enrolling in Faina’s new course. Check it out here and see a nifty preview to boot. Bold Brioche Cables is a new streamable course you can watch at your own pace, anywhere, any time, on any device.
Happy watching!
Allison
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