fifty-seventh skein and eleventh hat

Here we have the fifty-seventh skein that ever I spun, or rather a portion thereof after knitting and frogging.

Here we also have my eleventh hat, knit from the fifty-seventh skein along with the previous three, one of which was composed of small skeins of blue, red, and light blue each mixed with the base colour.

This hat entailed quite a lot of frogging until I got the results I wanted.

I like how tidy the brim is. I learned provisional cast on for this, and knit the provisional cast on together with the live stitches for a seamless turned hem that covered up all the many sewn ends. You can't see them, but I put extra stripes on the underside and they added more loose ends.

The brim had to be knit twice, since my gauge was off the first time.

I like the look of the decreases. I originally decreased the stitches in two places, after the pattern Whitney's 70s Ski Hat. The yarn refused to drape and stuck out in an unpleasant fashion. I tried no decreases and sewn seams making a four point peak. That did not produce a wearable hat either. Finally I decreased in five places, slowly at first, then more rapidly. This resulted, as I'd hoped, in a natural-looking shape that conforms to the head. As a bonus, the five-point decrease has the beautiful proportion of phi, the golden ratio 1:1.618 found in starfish, the cross-section of apples, and such.