I have moved past the ‘serious pondering’ stage of the hat and onto the ‘yarn on needles’ stage.  In the process, I’ve learned several things.  Among them:

-Heads come in an impressive range of sizes, and people are far less likely to know their head size than their shoe size.

-Hats can reasonably use a much wider range of thicknesses of yarn than socks can.  You can totally have a super bulky hat, while socks made in super bulky yarn would be… well…slippers.

-The thicker the yarn, the more gauge seems to matter.

All this led me to take a most unusual step.  I knit a gauge swatch — but only sort of.  My gauge is different in the round than back and forth, but knitting swatches in the round is soul-suckingly terrible.  So I thought I’d just knit some little mitts and call them a swatch.  It’s a totally valid choice, as long as you’re prepared to rip them out if you’ve guessed wrong.  Along the way, I discovered I need to use a different needle size.

This turns out to be a good thing since someone (someone small, furry, and named Barry) seems to have decided my size three wooden needles are the tastiest treat in all the land.  I knew there was a reason I didn’t like wooden needles.