Starting/finishing a 3-strand cable

How-to Questions
1

Hi all:

I’ve been knitting for a few weeks now (going great, thanks all for help with previous q’s here!) and am now playing around with Good Ole Cabled Scarf.

The three-strand cable at the center is nice and fun, but as currently written up it “just starts” right out of a field of seed stitch. On the swatch I’ve made to get the hang of the pattern, this makes for a slightly unattractive start to the scarf – since it is a three-strand three-stitch cable, there is a lopsided looking field of six stockinette on one side at the very beginning. This is made worse by the fact that the cable strands don’t start bunching up until the first crossover.

I’d like to see if I could achieve a cleaner end to the cable. The appearance I have in mind would be for the outer two strands of the cable to appear joined in a circular end, with the center strand appearing to have begun beneath, and a few rows of plain purl “background” beneath to set off the entire cable from the seed stitch border.

Have any of you all seen cables started/finished like this before? Suggestions on how I might do it, or other patterns or FO pics I might look to for inspiration? Alternative suggestions for an attractive cable start/finish also welcome!

      thanks,
         --FritzM.
2

Scratching my head on this a bit more, I thought of this approach that might be easier than a “circular” cable end:

Since the cable is surrounded by a border rib three stockinette on each side, maybe connect those two ribs at the bottom of the cable with a horizontal bar of stockinette. The outer two strands of the cable could then connect naturally to that horizontal bottom border. I could do the center strand in purl until the first crossover, which would push it back and make it look like “background”, to give some structure to the left strand at the start? So, something like:


V.V.VVV.. over VVV..VVV.V.V
.V.VVVV..VVVVVVVVV..VVVV.V.
V.V.VVV..VVVVVVVVV..VVV.V.V
.V.VVVV..VVV over ..VVVV.V.
V.V.VVV..VVV...VVV..VVV.V.V
.V.VVVV..VVV...VVV..VVVV.V.
V.V.VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV.V.V
.V.VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV.V.
V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V
.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.V.
3

I’m a bit lost myself…but, perhaps this tutorial will help you out?

Cable Tutorial

She goes into quite a bit of detail on how to make cables look the way you want them to.