A Hat for Hubby

Although we had a little dinner party last night and I spent the better part of the day cooking, I managed to squeeze in a few minutes of knitting to finish Hubby's hat.

It did come out pretty much like I'd pictured in my head, and meets his requirements.  He wanted a hat he could pull down over his ears when it is really cold and windy here (read: most of the time).  I thought it would be nice to have a hat that didn't have to be worn that way, so I tried to make a hybrid:

ear covering flipped down
the "helmet" look!

ear covering flipped up
the "lumberjack" look!

If I were making it for myself, I would put buttons at each side to attach the doubled part, but I knew that would be too fiddly for Hubby!

I'm so happy that he likes it.  He kept telling me he loves his new hat, and that I should make him a thousand more!  Such a sweetie!  Below are my notes, in case you would like to make one.

I made this with some Cascade 220 left over from a sweater I made him a couple years ago, and a US size 6 needle, in DPNs and 16" circular.  I don't have a scale, so I'm just guessing when I say I used about half the hank.

Because I knew I wanted to do short row shaping on the ribbing, I started at the top with 6 stitches, then increased 6 stitches every other row until I got my desired width, which I determined using good old Pi.  I measured Hubby's head circumference (23" - big, to accommodate all his brains!) subtracted 1" to give some negative ease, and divided that by 3.14, which came out to be almost exactly 7".

top down

For my gauge, this meant that I continued increasing until I had 96 stitches; I wanted to arrive at a number divisible by 4 because I knew that I wanted to do a 2 x 2 rib.  Then I knit straight for 3.5 inches.  After that I began the ribbing.  

After about an inch of ribbing, I began the short row shaping.  I marked off about 7" worth of stitches at the center front - for me this was 34 stitches.  For this section, I used a number not divisible by 4, so that the edges of each section would be the same (either knits or purls).  I put those stitches on a holder and began working back and forth on the remainder, short rowing by stopping one stitch short of the previous wrap each time, and doing a wrap-and-turn.  I did 20 rows in this way (10 wraps on each side), and then 4 more rows where I turned 2 stitches before the last wrap, to make the bottom a little more curved.  

At that point, I determined that the ear flap section was long enough to flip up - about 4".  So I put the front stitches back on the needle and knit one row straight all the way around, knitting in the wraps with their stitches.  Then I did two purl rows to give a little edging, and finally cast off in purl.

edging

And there you have it!

There's only one thing I would do differently next time:  I would increase every row the first couple times at the beginning.  Increasing every other row gave me a little point at the top which I had to steam pretty severely to get out.

One good thing about Chicago is that when it gets really cold, everybody piles on whatever they can, and nobody seems to care if you look like a dork!  We're all in the same boat!