This third brain hat is for me because I teach art and work with kids. I felt the need for a creative, right brain thinking cap.

Details--I made matching pairs of 5-stitch icords for this one. I folded the hat in half to stitch contrasting yarn in a running stitch to delineate the two brain halves before I pinned the icords like mirror-images of each other.

Note: It is helpful to make the front and back match first along the center division. Then work along the top beside the line and along the ribbing, before filling in whatever is left in the middle. The middle may not match exactly, but it will be harder to tell than at the edges where the two different colors meet.

I filled my solid pink colored beanie with a ball made from plastic grocery bags. (Any soft material should work because you don’t sew through it, but you need to be able to pin the icords to the beanie and into the “stuffing.”

At the beginning and end of each icord, I left a long tail for attaching it to the hat. After threading the tail onto a large needle, I sewed it to the hat with running stitches, catching about 2 strands of the knitting on the hat and then going up to catch 2 strands in the icord, back and forth. When the end was getting short I left it hanging inside the hat and worked from the other end of the icord until it met in the “middle.” Inside the hat I tied the two ends together and wove the ends in.