cable confusion

I've been very busy for the last few weeks knitting and crocheting items from my stash of left over wool. I'll show you some of the items at another time but this afternoon I settled down to watch the semi finals of the snooker and start a new knitting project at the same time. 2 hours later it was 10 inches long but then I had to put down the knitting as the match became very intense and my fingers could knit any faster; the more excited I become the faster I knit.

I don't know if you can see from the photo but this is a garter stitch scarf with a herringbone cable design in the centre panel. I like cabling and really enjoy the challenge of aran jumpers etc but it was not always so. When I was 15 I decided to knit myself a jumper as I had a paper round then and could afford to buy the wool. I went to the local draper's shop and spent ages choosing a trendy pattern and some royal blue wool which I was allowed to buy on the lay by system as I could only afford 2 balls a week.

All went well until I reached the top part of the front. Then the pattern said I should C3B and also C3F. I didn't know what this meant so looked in the abbreviations section. It said cable 3 back and cable 3 forward which meant nothing to me. I was at a loss as to what to do. The only person I knew that could knit was my grandmother so I asked my mother to ask her mother what it meant when she visited her later in the week. No luck, gran could only knit socks so I was no further forward. I went and knocked on the front doors of some of our neighbours for help but although some of them knew what cabling was they didn't know how to create it. I went to the draper's shop and asked the owner but she said she couldn't knit at all which was abit of a let down and I couldn't ask my old teacher because she had retired and moved away.
I was in a quandary: I didn't want to pull the work down and do a different pattern and I couldn't afford to not use the wool. I studied the picture on the pattern carefully and eventually created what I now call a twisted chain stitch which ran vertically to the top of the jumper. I thought it looked great and wore my jumper proudly once it was finished. Lots of my friends admired it and I wore it regularly; it was my own design after all!