cable swatches

My Sisters (of the wool) know that I sometimes read knitting patterns for fun. They sometimes call me the pattern whisperer. Yeah, maybe I'm a little weird. In any case, I have a queue project to make irish moss from Starmore's aran book for the maple man.

There is one cable chart for irish moss that has puzzled me recently. Actually it's two charts, one that crosses left and another that crosses right. You are knitting along with 1x1 rib tbl over 7 stitches and then 3 or 4 cross. And some of the colums, from the cable needle (I do own a set but they're never handy when I'm in a cabley (is that a word?) mood), change "mode", during the cross over. What I mean is that the k1tbl's turn into purls and the purls turn into knits.

So I had to swatch it:



And it works, as written. The middle cables in each set are my attempt at an "improvement" which as it turns out is ok but it's not an improvement at all. So my mind is at ease. I can quit reading that chat and saying "what?", or "surely this can't mean...".