Cabled Hat

My boyfriend recently lost his favorite winter hat, just before a trip to NYC. He requested a new hat, with some "texture" which I finally realised translated to cables. He also wanted a dark/charcoal grey. My LYS didn't carry Cascade 220 (my hat yarn of choice) in a dark enough grey so I went with this Berocco Ultra Alpaca in this gorgeous color - I believe it is "Charcoal Mix". This yarn is oh-so-yummy to work with but slightly thinner than Cascade 220. The halo helps it look like a nice firm fabric however. I eventually settled on a simple ropey cable that always crosses on top. It's a 6 stitch cable and I originally started with a 3 stitch purl section separating each cable. After my first cable twist I realised this would make the hat too big, so I decreased the purl section to two stitches. This means the hat fits nice and snug for the most part but it's a little bit looser at the bottom. If I hadn't been on a tight deadline, and hadn't already tried about four different stitch patterns, I might have started over again and worked the whole thing with a 2 stitch purl section, but alas - I was lazy. I was worried about the dark yarn hiding the cables but ultimately, I think it worked out quite nicely. I did some decreases at the top - first decreasing each of the three-stitch cable pieces to two, then decreasing the 2-stitch purl sections to 1, etc. I may try to take some better photos of the crown section and I may not - I also think I will write out the pattern more specifically so I have some hope of duplicating it in the future!