My very successful spiral hat with the textured brim inspired a spin-off. Chris has been bugging me forever for a new hat since one I made him a few years ago has stretched out so far that it’s now ginormous. Given that Chris’s head is already off the percentile charts in size for average adult males, that’s saying something.

We took a measurement and his head is a whopping 25 inches around! And yes, it’s full of good stuff!

I didn’t really have a pattern for this and I had to call in some help from my friend Michelle, who is fantastic at knitting math and has far more experience than I do. The hat is done in Americo’s Peruvian wool, leftover from the Cobblestone sweater I made for Chris this past spring. The yarn is probably a heavy worsted weight (they don’t really have it labeled), and I worked it using 4.5 mm needles.

The texture is borrowed from MintyFresh’s Roman Earflap Hat, which is in turn from Barbara Walker’s first stitch treasury:

Round 1: *k2, sl1 wyib, k3; repeat from *, end k1.
Round 2: *p2, sl1 wyib, p3; repeat from *, end p1.
Round 3: *sl1 wyib, k3; repeat from *.
Round 4: *sl1 wyib, p3; repeat from *.
Repeat rounds 1–4 to desired hat depth, in this case, about 7 inches.

I was kind of stumped with how to deal with the decreases though. I couldn’t decide if I should just seam it somehow, or if there was a way to decrease it and still maintain the texture. I had already had a lot of trouble losing my place (I frogged several rows and still ended up messing up two rows, only noticing them once I was well beyond them, and there was no way I was going to un-knit that far back). The miss-knit rows are barely perceptible so I just let them go.

Michelle helped me figure out what to do. We agreed that it would be simplest to decrease this way: k25, k2tog, k2tog, repeated four times. I did this on each knitted row, reducing each section by two stitches (eg: second decrease row: k23, k2tog, k2tog, repeated four times) all the way to the end. After each decrease I aimed to pick up the texture as best as possible and happily you can barely discern any obvious changes at the decreased spots.

Anyway, the boy is very pleased with his hat and I must say, he looks awful handsome in it. And he says it’s super warm. Mission accomplished.