I’m making this for my friend Miriam, who has hair down to her knees. The hat needs to be big and slouchy just to fit all her hair when it’s up in a bun, and I’m including a large “buttonhole” that she can put her hair through when it’s in a braid.

The pattern is modified to suit the weight of the yarn; I cast on 80 stitches (with a tubular cast-on for springiness) for the ribbing, and then increased by 70% to 136 stitches for the cabling.

I made a matching neckwarmer; turns out the cable pattern is much more annoying to knit as a reversible cable, so it took me a year to do a tiny little thing, but it came out very nicely.