At knitting one evening, my friend announced that her super power was that all hats look good on her. For just the tiniest moment, I hated her (sorry Nadine). At that time I had yet to find a knitted hat that looked better on me than a standard ball cap. What’s a knitwear designer to do? Well, design a hat with a bill, of course!

The unique rolled bill on The Platypus Hat is the perfect compromise between a ball cap’s firm bill and knitted hat’s soft fabric. I don’t know why, but it works with my face–and on Nadine (whose super power is undeniable) it’s seriously adorable!

The Platypus Hat comes in 3 sizes (18, 20 and 22 inches) and can be made either “sleek” (which the men in my life prefer) or “slouchy” (which is roomy enough to hide all your hair on a bad hair day)!. It is made with Knit Picks Chroma Twist Bulky–a truly gorgeous yarn which I highly recommend.

The pattern includes a unique bonus feature. After finally finding the hat shape that works with my face I wanted to put the Platypus bill on all the hats in the world (or at least all the hat patterns in my Ravelry queue). To do this I created a programmed PDF that does all the math. All you have to do is enter the cast on number for any hat that is worked from the brim up, and The Platypus Extension will automatically customize a bill for that hat. This reusable feature will work on any device in Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Difficulty: Intermediate
Techniques used: Long Tail or Twisted German Cast on, short rows, decreases