I’ve been playing with rope/cord/line for my entire life. Sometimes more successfully than others. After making the lanyard for my wife’s cane, I decided that my hat needed some color as well.
I made a practice braid out of scrap cord so I could estimate how much I would need. Turns out 30 inches of cord makes 24 inches of braid.
Then I strung a piece of cord around the webbing on my hat so I could figure out a design I liked.
And yes, I could have just braided onto the webbing, but that didn’t feel quite right.
Two pieces each 24’ long. Seems like a lot for a hat, but here we go.
But, because I’m so damn extra, let’s make a four strand braid with three colors.
I decided to make one strand black, one black w/ reflective & glow in the dark tracers and two burgundy. I fused the two black variants together. Because I don’t like to fold at the joint, the fuse is a few turns below the start of the braid.
Once the braid was long enough, I ran it through the webbing & spliced the cords back onto themselves
To finish the band, I needed a decorative knot long enough to cover the splice, the fuse, and the bitter ends of the cords. Sadly, I don’t have any good photos of this process as it was so frustrating that I nearly set the whole damn hat on fire.
Several times.
Basically, the four strands were woven into a Turks head. Then the Turks head was doubled so every pass had two widths of cord. To finish it off, I ran the ends down between the Turks head and the original braid.
The final step was to dress (tighten) the knot and remove all the slack. Once the knot was tight, I cut the cords as close to the knot as possible and pushed them back into the knot with a screwdriver.
Modern Anachronist 