(This is a click-through from post 4 of "pocket hats")
The last color of the pocket hats goes across the whole hat top. It creates a stripe in profile, but, seen from above, this last color actually makes a spot, not a stripe, per the opening photo of post 4 of the pocket hat KAL. Due to our cultural heritage, it is this dual spot/stripe nature which grants us the latitude to adjust the top color of the hat.
Specifically, unlike the ancient Egyptians, our graphical heritage doesn't insist that all representations of reality be made in strict profile. Because of cultural advancements, we are willing to accept even a 3/4 face as a "profile," a thing those ancients would have found unthinkable--impossible to draw, and unthinkable to see. In fact, the Egyptian experience was only the beginning of a long slow road in the representational arts. Even after full-face drawing and painting were invented, the pictures were still flat and child-like. It was not until the Renaissance that culture advanced enough so that true perspective was first introduced to art.
This climb up the ladder of perception is mirrored in the development of children today. Even modern children have a hard time going beyond a flat, outline version of the world: although surrounded by realistic graphic representations from birth, it is not until 4th or 5th grade that most children can first be brought to draw pictures in anything other than perspective-less flat pictures.
All this points to the fact that education and culture (and adulthood) brings us to accept these hat tops as both stripes AND spots, just as physicists are brought to accept light as both a particle (photon) AND a wave (light wave). The bottom line to all this philosophical rambling is that, in the context of the pocket hats, our modern, adult eyes are willing to accept the final color as a stripe AND a spot at the same time. In other words, in the same way that your eye is willing spot the profile of a face in a 3/4 portrait, your eye is willing to assign more or less of the "other side" of the SPOT to the profile of the STRIPE.
This educated flexibility of the eye gives you a bit of latitude to play with the row count of this last color without making the hat look unbalanced between the top color and the preceding color stripes. Translated into practical terms, this means that if your pocket hat doesn't fit quite as you would wish, you can pull out only the top color and confidently re-knit it some degree bigger or smaller without fear of doing violence to the color-stripe arrangement of the hat.
