Remember how I said you run a little line of the color you use on the brim all the way up the side of your hat? Yeah, there are a couple reasons for that!⁠

First, it just looks cool (I’ll show you the tiny starburst it makes on the top here shortly, or if you look back at yesterday’s post you can catch a glimpse of it). But it also does something practical!⁠

You see, when you’re knitting in the round, you’re actually working in a very shallow spiral (that’s why you get a weird little jog at the beginning of the round if you work stripes in the round). If you tried to work rows of embroidery all the way around the hat, the two ends wouldn’t quite meet up. ⁠

When you run up against something like that, where the Fundamental Nature Of How Knitting Works smashes up against what you *want* it to do, you can either try and fight it (by doing something like working the hat flat and seaming it or playing with some of the various tricks folks have come up with to make stripes have less of a jog), or you can embrace it (which is what I did here).⁠

Both are totally valid approaches!⁠

But in this case, I decided that running that line up made the knitting easier (I don’t especially *want* to seam my hat thank you very much), looked rather nifty, and made it super easy to place the embroidery.⁠

Plus it makes the hat look rather nifty, even without the embroidery (did I actually take a picture of the hat in that state? nope, nope I did not, but I’ll show you the crown tomorrow and you’ll get the idea)!⁠

The hat is called Expound. And if you find yourself wanting to go ahead and just give in to the fundamental nature of knitting, you can find it in all the usual places!