For some reason I really enjoy figuring out how to work decreases and increases into stitch patterns: witness all of my hats (Beaufort, Maple Seed, Rose of Sharo

Here is a lovely Sherwood with a few minor mods, by Eileen; according to her the color is really more red than it appears in the photo. And below are only three of the Maple Seed hats knit by Sandra, who is apparently making one for everyone she knows! 

Sandra sent me an email with a link to this gorgeous lavender Maple Seed Hat; the cotton yarn shows off the stitches beautifully.  (Maple Seed pattern here.)  Thanks Sandra!   

Well, Jeri, that is a very good question, and one which I had asked myself--and why doesn't Maple Seed swirl in the opposite direction, since it uses left-slanting decreases (SSKs) instead of right-slanting decreases (k2tog)? The stitch pattern for Beaufort originally caught my attention because it was so similar to one segment of Chinese Lace, and I had even MORE questions about the latter.  Why do the first two segments, rows 1-4 and 5-8 on the chart, slant to the left, even though the YOs slant to the right, and the decreases slant both left and right?  Why are the third and sixth segments, rows 9-12 and 21-24, essentially vertical, in spite of slanting YOs and decreases slanting both left and right?  And why do the remaining segments, rows 13-16 and 17-20, slant to the right, even though the YOs slant to the left?  Is it the proximity of YOs and decreases?  Well, I must admit that the main conclusion I had drawn from Chinese Lace was that the direction of decreases and the position of YOs does not always determine the slant of a stitch pattern--or lack thereof.  And this was confirmed by my experience with Beaufort and Maple Seed. But to return to Jeri's question, there are two different kinds of swirls going on in these hats:  one is the spiral at the crown, and the other is the diagonal that the stitch pattern creates, which would exist even if the knit fabric was flat.  First, why does the stitch pattern spiral at the crown?  I had noticed the same phenomenon in Grumperina's Odessa hat pattern.  I know that I did nothing in the way of decreases to create the spiral at Beaufort's crown; in fact, I reworked those decreases a number of times, not only to create the most consistently decreasing shapes within the knit columns, but also to keep the natural spiral as smooth as possible. We've already noted that Beaufort's stitch pattern moves at an angle from the bottom edge--which is a circle, since it's a hat.  If you picture a hat as a series of concentric circles, and the line crossing the circles at left shows the angle of B's stitch pattern, you can see that as the circles get smaller, and the line continues to cross each one at the SAME angle as the first, it begins to curve in a spiral. As for what causes that angle, if you look closely at the photo of Beaufort, you can see that the decreases for each 4-row pattern repeat form the shape of a triangle, (I'll call these the "decrease triangles", colored gray in the above diagram), while the corresponding YOs form--roughly-- an upside-down triangle that fits next to the first (white in the diagram; the purled areas are represented by the squiggly lines).  Thus begins the Beaufort swirl, but what causes it to continue is that the left lower corner of each subsequent decrease triangle sits on the apex of the decrease triangle below, forming a diagonal line. Clear?  Unclear?  Agree?  Disagree?  The floor is open for discussion.

The spiraling columns on this hat remind me of the spinning trajectory of a falling maple seed, and if you look closely at the columns, the shape of the maple seed’s wing will emerge.

I finished this hat about a month ago, and wrote a quick post promising the pattern, once I had finished a variation using SSKs instead of k2togs.  I worked on said variation over the weekend, and when I started the crown