What love makes us do

We're still waiting to hear from the seller regarding the termites. Meanwhile, I finished the first project with some of the yarn I got in February. It's a hat for the spouse that he requested a long time ago.

Now the spouse is very understanding when it comes to dealing with my stash and random projects lying around our place, but he understands very little about knitting. He wanted a very thin hat (thus thin yarn, thin needles and hundreds of stitches) with a chess theme, but he wanted the hat knit in only one color. How do you provide contrast for the figures to stand out? I did my best. From this angle, you can barely see the bishop and the knight. The other four figures are distributed evenly around his head and they are as difficult to figure out as these two.

I was unhappy about making this hat from the very beginning, mainly because of the extremely thin yarn, but love made me finish it. He seems unhappy about the final results, but love makes him wear it with no complaints.