I designed this hat for my mom, who loves cables. I wanted to play with a couple ideas. First was an idea for a cable decrease where one strand of the cable was knit together with the other to decrease out that number of stitches all in one. It plays nicely into the idea of the cables being like netting over the hat. The second idea was also based on cables being like rope or cords, and the image of a braid that’s coming loose at the untied end. Because I liked the idea of everything flowing together, I set up for the cables straight out of the ribbing.

March 11th 2009: I’ve updated the pattern to correct the ribbing directions. They now read as follows:
Establish ribbing as follows:
Row 1: P1, K2, P1, K2, P1, K2, P3, K2, P2, K2, P2, K2, P2, K2, P2, K2, P2, K2, P2 repeat 3 times total (108 stitches)