Girl's Cabled Tam with a Pom-Pom

As the yarn store clerk said to me earlier this week, the Christmas-present knitting season has begun. Since my family members don't read all my blog posts, I'm not too worried about posting a few things that will probably end up under the tree (if I don't break down and hand them out sooner).

I haven't done a lot of cabling, and I'm always surprised how much bang you get for relatively little fuss. This pattern comes from the Fall 2013 issue of KnitSimple magazine (page 30). The designer is Nitza Coto. In the magazine, it's shown in coral pink, and the suggested yarn is CHARLY by Filatura di Crosa, but I used Cascade's 100% Peruvian Highland Wool.

I added the pom-pom because it's for my 12-year-old niece and I seem to be operating under the delusion that she'll be attending a lot of skating parties with cocoa and Nutcracker premieres this winter. This was a very satisfying project that took me about four Downton Abbey episodes to knit, counting the fact that I misread the pattern and had to rip out about 15 rows of the cabling and redo it.

Technical point: in this pattern, M1 or "make one" means to wrap the yarn around the needle without knitting it. I normally would expect the abbreviation YO ("yarn over") for this move. Normally, I expect M1 to mean knitting into the front and back of a stitch, thereby increasing the count by one. In this pattern, they use KFB ("knit front & back") when they want you to do this. That's why I had to redo so many rows.