I’ve come up with a new way to describe cables in knitting patterns. I hope if you come across it in one of my designs, you’ll find it intuitive to use. 

Cables are described like this: C4B2[k2|p2]. This reads as “Make a Cable across 4 stitches. Slip 2 stitches onto the cable needle and hold at the Back. k2 from the left needle and p2 from the cable needle.” I know this is a lot more verbose than a simple C4B, but when the cables get more complicated, I detest having to flip back to the index of abbreviations every 5 seconds to look up what say, “T4pF” means. This way, even complicated cables will still be written the same way. For example, an unbalanced cable in something other than stockinette might be notated C7F3[k1,p2,k1|p1,k1,p1], meaning: make a 7-stitch cable. slip 3 sts onto the cable needle and hold at front of work, (k1, p2,k1) from left needle; then (p1,k1,p1) from cable needle. I sincerely hope a beast so hideous does not exist, but if there was ever a need for it, at least I’d be able to abbreviate it!