I was thrilled to get the go-ahead to write the article on earflap hats. There are so many fun ideas for earflap hats to choose from. I finally decided to design an Andean Chullo style hat. What a deep rabbit hole it turned out to be to explore. The colors and motifs are fun, and there is quite a bit of freedom for design.

I chose to go with the rainbow-style strip for shaping the earflaps. A strip of colored squares is worked first. In the middle of the strip a short-row triangle is formed. Then stitches are picked up along the curved edge, this being the basic way to form the earflap. From there the squares can be embellished by checkerboard and even alternating triangles around the base. The earflap is shaped using two mirrored double decreases at the center. When approximately one third of the stitches are left, the flap is folded in half and joined. In this pattern I used a three-needle bind off, but you could easily bind off the stitches and seam the center together. This produces a slightly concave earflap.