A Very Plain Hat

It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that my boyfriend Rahul didn’t want a hat with cables and Fair Isle and fanciness. All he wanted, it turns out, was a Very Plain Hat. He’s rejected various hats I’ve made—Koolhaas, Shedir, a black cabled hat with earflaps, a hilarious balaclava-style hat with attached beard and mustache—by admiring them at first, then quietly leaving the house without them.

When we took a recent trip to Madison, Wisconsin, in March, and the icy wind was whipping off the lakes, turning his unguarded ears a distressing shade of red, I decided to make him a new hat to keep his head warm, a hat he would actually wear. I stopped in at a local yarn store and bought a skein of Berroco Ultra Alpaca, and less than 24 hours later, Rahul had a Very Plain Hat, his current favorite, the only hat I’ve made him that I’ve seen him wear consistently and ask after when it’s being washed.

I kept getting ideas in my head about stripes and knit/p