As I don’t do wool and I want things to be machine washable my options for yarns can be limited. Fortunately CoBaSi DK comes in many fine colors. It’s pretty pricey. The yarn for this project ran me about $150. If you decide to make this, I hope that you are OK with wool and can do it in a nice merino that blocks and that weighs less for the same warmth.

Do not do this project if you aren’t confident in your circular needles. The very many stitches create a lot of stress on the cable joins as you wrangle them around. Having a cable break in the middle of this will just suck.

I know that I say to start with a 60”, but when I started I didn’t have a 60”. I fastened two shorter cables with a little fastener thingie and had to deal with them unscrewing a bit every now and then. Ugh. By the time my 60” showed up in the mail I was down to a 40”.

Step 1: trim

Cast on 20 stitches in butter cream, knit 8’ (yes, that’s eight feet) of five part braid cable (crosses every 4 rows) and graft the ends together. That may seem like a lot, but it will shrink a little bit and you don’t want the bottom edge to be too tight.

Note: if you want a shorter cape, you can lop a few inches off the trim, or a couple of feet for a kid’s cape.

You can knit some other cable too. There’s nothing special about the braid cable except that it’s only an eight row repeat and that makes it easier to line things up later.

This trim took me three skeins of CoBaSi DK.

Slightly more detail:

First row (ws) p3, k2, p10, k2, p3. All other rows k the k and p the p.

Knit at least four rows plain before you start the cable crosses so you’ll have an easy time grafting the live stitches at the end to the beginning. Don’t bother with a provisional cast-on as it’s tidier to attach the two ends by overlapping them slightly and sewing the live stitches to “dead” stitches about two rows in on the other end. If it isn’t tidy, don’t worry. The grafted bit goes in the back.

Do not make a slip stitch selvedge as the ribs will end up looking loose and sloppy, and picking up at a right angle will be more complicated. Instead, knit or purl every edge stitch.

Before you graft the ends together, fold the trim in half and pin it together in various places with safety pins or locking stitch markers to help keep yourself from twisting it. You don’t want it twisted. You really don’t.

Step 2: pick up

Mark the center back (the seam) with a safety pin or locking stitch marker or bit of scrap yarn. Mark the center front likewise. You can count the number of cable repeats to make sure you have the right spot for the center front. It may help to mark half-way between the front and the back with safety pins as well. Being off by a couple of stitches won’t hurt you, but being off by a lot will.

Chances are one edge will be slightly longer than the other as our first and last stitches rarely match. If so, the shorter edge goes on “top” where you pick up.

Using a 60” circular needle one or two sizes smaller than you’re going to use to knit the cape, pick up stitches in your contrasting color (forestry here) starting at the middle back at a rate of two stitches for every three rows (pick up, pick up, skip), all the way around. There will be a lot of stitches. I have no idea how many.

The front panel is 36 stitches wide. I marked 18 stitches on both sides of the front center pin and did the same on the back for a matching blank panel.

Switch to your regular needle size and continue knitting up to two stitches before the marker at the start of the front pattern panel.

About the pattern panel:

The leaf lace is a pretty standard pattern, but you can find it charted here for your convenience.

The cable pattern is called OXO. I chose to make the cable appear to have a point at the top and the bottom, but you can knit it so that it starts anywhere.

Some day I’ll make an actual chart with both of these elements together. I promise.

If you look at my (pink, acrylic) swatch, you’ll see the heavy bias to the leaf pattern. I partially offset it by throwing a pair of short rows under the OXO cable on the first row as detailed below.

I made an incorrect cross at the bottom of the swatch. OXO always seems to try to fake me out on which cross to do.

Step 3: the body

K2tog the last two stitches before the panel start stitch marker. In between markers you’ll knit the pattern panel.

Note that every other row for now will be completely plain knit with no cable and no lace-ish leaf.

Remember I mentioned throwing in a pair of short rows under the cable? The first pattern row after the stitch marker looks like this:

P2, right leaf, p2 k8 p2, short row turn (I do German short rows, but any short row will work), k the k and p the p until right before the leaf panel, then throw in another turn, p1 k8 p2, left leaf, p2.

SSK after the marker.

Then knit plain until the marker for the back panel, k2tog, k 36, ssk.

Make your first cable cross on the second leaf pattern row, which is row 4.

After that it gets way easier. You only cable every 4 rows, though you do have to knit the pattern of the leaf panel every other row and likewise with decreases at the panel sides. Time to knit and watch TV.

Eventually you can switch to a shorter circular needle.

Step 4: re-evaluate my life choices

I knit about 14” up when I realized that at that rate the cape would be enormous and cost a bloody fortune in yarn. At that point I started decreasing every row.

I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand the change in decrease rate gives the cape a bit of shoulder shaping. On the other, the front is a bit bunched up starting when I decrease every row.

You have a choice. Either decrease every other row until you get to about 14” and switch to every row, or start out decreasing two rows out of three, which will be smooth and even but harder to keep track of. Which is better? Who knows?

The total length was about 30”. Twenty-four inches of trim on one of the “triangles” gives you about 30” of height if you double the rate of decrease about half-way up. If I had not done so, the length would be closer to 45”.

Step 5: more and more

Knit a lot of leaves. I knit 24. It’s important to stop before the neck gets too small, because edging. I stopped when I had about 48 k stitches left at the “shoulders,” i.e. the stitches between the stitch markers on the steadily decreasing sides. The neck ended up a bit snug. Granted, it’s great for a cold weather wrap. But if you want a wider neckline, you’re going to have to stop one or two repeats sooner.

As I wanted to end the cable pattern as I began it, at a sort of point, I could only pick a stopping point every 16 rows.

Now we’re going to do some neck shaping with a bind off and short rows.

Step 6: neck shaping

You don’t have to do this part, but it bothered me that all the leaf lace examples I saw (see swatch picture) sort of cut off the top leaf when it was obvious that some shaping could make it prettier. You can do this with short rows.

The catch with short rows is that I can’t come up with a way to avoid doing (some of) the leaf decreases on the back side, which means a lot of flipping back and forth to see if i did them right. But there aren’t many.

After you finish the last pattern row of the last leaf, knit until the first front stitch marker.

Knit the leaf (P2, k10, p1), bind off the next p, the ks of the cable, and the two following p.There should be only one live stitch just to the inside of the leaves. You need those live stitch. They provide a selvedge for picking up for the collar.

Knit the other half of the leaf panel and keep knitting around Until you get back around to the stitch before where you bound off at the top of the cable.

Make a short row turn. Make your short rows nice and snug or picking up for the collar will be (you guessed it) loose and sloppy.

You are now doing a pattern row from the wrong side. I apologize for that.

Fortunately the only pattern you have to do here is two decreases, one on either side of the leaf. Otherwise k the k and p the p. Knit back around. Make decreases on the other half of the leaf panel, then short row turn on the last stitch.

You don’t bind off anything else yet except for the knit stitches that are the top of the cable and the p’s on either side, but the decreases will give you a V neck.

When you have only two knit stitches left for each leaf, decrease them together. Knit two more rounds so that there are purl stitches above the leaf, then bind off all the remaining live stitches with your choice of bind-off.

Step 6: collar

It might make more sense to knit the collar separately and sew it on, because there is no way to create the nice tidy transition as you have on the bottom where you pick up stitches in a very traditional way.

The argument against doing that is that I threw some short rows in among the cable to make it curve in at the V-neck, the outside edge being longer than the inside one. Worth it? Not sure.

Cast on 20 stitches in buttercream and knit 4 plain rows of edging. Then knit a cable row (right side). Do not knit the last stitch of the row, but slip it.

At the exact middle of the back of the cape body, insert the right knitting needle into the v in the stitch below the bind off on the cape body and pick up. Tension this stitch carefully. Knit the slipped stitch and the picked up stitch together as if they were a SSK.

Knit a wrong side row.

Knit a right side row, picking up below the bound-off edge and doing the SSK thing.

Knit a wrong side row.

When you get to the end of the right side row, skip one stitch on the neck edge of the body and pick up through the second stitch.

Keep doing this, picking up for two stitches on the body and skipping one, until you get to the diagonal above the right (facing) leaf. Make two sets of short-row turns along the cable, elongating the bottom edge a bit. Yes, that’s hard to picture. But you want the outside of the neck trim to be longer than the edge around your neck.

Make another cable repeat spread out with short row turns tucked into the cable pattern centered over the cable. Make another cable repeat elongated on the bottom edge with short rows above the left (facing) leaf.

Continue until you get to the back of the neck. Then sew or graft the live stitches to stitches a couple of rows in on the start of the trim.

You Are Done.