Despite Laurie‘s very clever guess that I am being punished by the knitting goddess, (which I must admit is really my gut feeling as well, but I am the suspicious type) I persevered and finished the hat without any further mishap.

No locusts, lightning strikes, floods or famines. I did take out a new project and put the yarn right in the living room to threaten the hat, and that seemed to take the edge off. I quite like the hat, and I’m especially loving the top.

The hat does measure 23″ around, leading us to Joe’s head size. Yesterday when I got the first comment saying that I may have mis-measured Joe’s head, since someone with a head 25 inches would be a genetic anomaly, I approached him subtly and re-measured. When Joe asked me what I was doing, I had to think quickly and come up with a clever response. I settled on “Nothing”, followed quickly by “What are you doing?” This distracted him, and I was able to confirm the 25″ hat size. I decided to disregard Aubergine of the comments, and contemplate the possibility that Aubergine has a very small head, and small headed friends. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that)
When Anne and Melissa also commented that 25″ seemed large, I couldn’t ignore the trend and decided to re-measure Joe again. Since I am not a raving incompetent who can’t measure a head, I decided that the fault must lie with my blue tape measure. I went and got the yellow one and approached Joe again. “It’s still going to be the same size Steph” he said, before I even got close. “I just want to check one more thing” I say. He resisted me for a few more minutes and it started looking like I might have to take my top off if I wanted to get my way, but at the last minute the phone rang and I got my chance while he was talking.
25″ , even with the yellow tape measure. I start thinking about getting on the internet to research head sizes, just to find out how big a freak my husband is. (I also spent some time wondering if this freakishly large head could explain any of the odd behaviour that he exhibits from time to time, or how it is that you can live with someone for this long and not know this about their head…but lets not focus on that.)
Then, a comment from Emma, who I think we can all agree appears to be normal in all the important ways and clever enough to knit lovely things…and yet claims to have a 24″ head. This is significant news.
I knit on the lovely hat for a while, and stop looking sideways at Joe to see if his head looks big. All goes well until Joe reads the blog comments later that evening. Now he’s muttering to himself as he works around the house. Things like: “Nothing wrong with a big head” and the very clever “I bet lots of people have big heads”. I’ve finally reassured him by convincing him that I “like” big headed men, and that it’s an enormous reason why I love him, and that I will point out to the blog readers that he’s a big guy, not some tiny little pencil with an enormous head stuck on top. I’ve also suggested that should I find myself with the opportunity, I could imply (in a very tasteful way) that he is a very manly big all over. That shut him up.