The Rios is a little heavier than the recommended yarn; dropping down to 3.5mm needles gave me gauge.

Cable band worked counterclockwise as per pattern; have seen other project notes that claim this is an error and they’ve worked it clockwise, skipping the first row of the chart, but it works perfectly fine as written if one pays attention to all the instructions for the crochet cast on … the pattern states quite clearly that you are supposed to work a plain row of knit through the back loop stitches into the cast on before starting the cable chart. Doing this puts your yarn in the right position for knitting the cable as charted in the counterclockwise direction, with wrongside rows ending at the ribbed band and rightside rows beginning at the ribbed band. The narrow portion of the cable is supposed to be close to the ribbing and the wider unraveled portion of the cable should be over the short row stockinette section worked above the ribbing, increasing the lopsided effect.

The other reason for working that row of knit-through-the-back-loop stitches into the crochet cast on before starting the cable chart: a provisional crochet cast on cannot be pulled out of an initial row of mixed knit and purl stitches … that first row has to be all knit or all purl to allow the crochet chain to be pulled out instead of picked out.

Re grafting cable band: googled instructions for grafting ribbing (because it’s k2p2 all across the starting and ending rows), tried a few methods that claimed to minimize the offset stitch problem, including one specifically for 2x2 ribbing, and none of them looked good. Then got creative. I moved all the stitches from two needles onto a single needle, alternating as I went. And then did it again, reversing the alternation because the first attempt had the patterning way out of alignment. Second try with the stitches alternated the other way looked much better. Then bound off from the wrong side by purling two together (one stitch from each end), purling two together again and passing first stitch over second. Did that all the way to the end and the result is a right side that looks way better than any of the grafting attempts. Not perfect and seamless, but the join is only visible very close up as the stitch columns are nearly perfectly in alignment with just a indent to mark where the bind-off is. And that may very well become less visible with time. :-)

Note: I know I could have just worked a purlways three-needle bindoff but I wanted to make absolutely sure I had the best alignment possible before binding off and moving all the stitches to one needle first, seeing that the stitch alignment was way off, and then reversing the alternation to be sure I had the closest alignment was, to me, the better method.

Took a better look at my cable join after I’d picked up the crown stitches and got a bright idea. The purled stitches look great as is; it’s just the knit stitches that show the slight indent at the join. I rather suspect I can render that invisible with a piece of leftover yarn and my darning needle by weaving a pretend knit stitch joining each side of the knit stitch columns … will report on that when I try it.

Picking up crown stitches. On my practice version of this hat several years ago one thing I really disliked was the appearance of the upper edge of the cable band after the stitches were picked up; basically one of the two columns of knit stitches edging the band was “lost” which wrecked the symmetry with the double column of knit stitches on the ribbed edge (yeah, I know, B.S. Johnson so messed up is part of the theme, but it bugged me). Also the joining of the band and ribbed edge gives an illusion of the band sitting above the surface of the hat as if it had been slipped on over a plain hat and I wanted that look on the upper edge of the band as well. So I picked up, from the inside, the bar between the two knitted edge stitches instead. Looks horrible and distorted and overstretched when you do it by threading a circular needle all the way around but does make a nifty “ladder” effect that made stitch counting a breeze; three bars on inside of needle, fourth on the outside, repeat until you have 44 groups of three on the inside and you have your 132 perfectly spaced stitches. As soon as I’d knitted the first round of the crown all the distortion disappeared, the two columns of knit stitches edging the top of the cable band snugged back together and I had exactly the look I was hoping for. :-)

Finis! Top photo is most colour-true. Second photo shows the join in the cable band after I made a couple of fake stitches in each knit column (had left very long tails for for my original cast on and also for the rejoining of the yarn to work the crown … I wove in the cast on tail up through the ribbing and had enough to do fake stitches and a further weave in on the bottom half of the band; wove in the crown tail downwards, did the fake stitches in the top half of the band and then further weaving in)

Did have enough yarn left that I could have made the hat deeper; yarn scale batteries have died so will add an accurate weight once I’ve tracked down replacements.

P.S. Also eventually figured out why my initial attempts at grafting the cable band weren’t quite right; if I’d grafted my final live row to the first pattern row all should have been well. Wasn’t thinking and had tried to graft to the plain knit row that joined the provisional cast on to the band proper.

December 5/2016: Decided a while back that I wanted to lengthen this to a decent hat depth which would be more useful than the shallow beanie one gets following the pattern. So, sudden cold weather being an excellent incentive, tonight I ripped it back to the plain row before the first crown decrease row, threaded the stitches back onto a needle and have started knitting plain rounds of 132 stitches. I’ve got enough leftover yarn that I can deepen it by several centimetres before starting the decreases again.

December 10/2016: Could tell I was going to lose at yarn chicken in the hat deepening (note to self: remember you are crap at guesstimating yarn needs/usage) and decided to buy another skein of the yarn in this colourway rather than rip back again because I liked the new depth as it was. Having been bought months after the first the second skein is a little more orange-vivid than the first but alternating the skeins for several rounds softened that so all is good.