Considering the climate change hasn’t eliminated winter yet, here’s something to keep your head warm. As a bonus, it won’t deduct from your carefully planned geek look.

The hat inside out, note the two threads running around the hat

The pattern repeats three times around the hat (the hat is 96 stitches around which fits nicely to my adult-sized head). You can use more colors but this results in more threads running inside the hat (and probably is a bit harder to knit), maybe you could use this to your advantage and make the hat warmer.

Note that the above pattern is 28 stitches wide. If your hat isn’t e.g. 28*3=84 stitches wide, you have to pad the pattern with empty stitches. Add the padding stitches at the green lines, in my case there are two and two padding stitches added (i.e. there are four empty stitches between the bottom sprite) to make the pattern 32 stitches wide making the pattern fit exactly three times on the hat. Also, keep in mind the hat starts to get narrower after the pattern ends, so you can’t use the same pattern all the way to the top. In this case only two rows of sprites could be fit on the hat (I wanted a hat that isn’t floppy on the top).

Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive article on knitting (take a look at the instructional links) but you’ll probably get the same information in a much nicer form if you ask your mom or grandmother. In any case, knitting is not hard. You just have to have some finger dexterity which most geeks have, because geeks type fast.