Football Hat fixed

My co-worker came up to me on Dec 23.  He said to me in the kitchen, "I have a knitting question for you."  Really!  A knitting question.  I was intrigued.  I walked back to his desk and he showed me this:

Oh, uh. Boo boo. And it didn't look like it had enough yarn to rework it. I told him I thought I could fix it, but needed the break over Christmas to do so. We talked about whether I could use another color for the tip if I couldn't find a brown, and he agreed that a cream would be ok. 

I asked all my buddies if they had a match for the brown, and Becky thought she did, but not in acrylic.  I then checked with Mary Ann, who has oodles of Simply Soft, but she said the yarn was thinner than Simply Soft when I showed her.  Ah, but her house is about a mile away from Michael's, so I stopped there on the way home.  I also didn't want to risk ordering something online from JoAnn's, because I knew the child would be wanting it asap.  Well, Michael's had three browns to choose from, and I ended up with a too thin Loops and Threads superfine weight, which I doubled.  I had a 50% off coupon in my email, and the very patient man at the register helped me get the right store location on my app and navigated me to the coupon, so I could pay a whopping total of $1.50 cash for the yarn.  My entire purchase.  Ha!  I love the hunt for a bargain and the conquest!

And here is the finished product, my first finished project of the year:

I ended up ripping back only one row or so, and then worked the k2tog rather tightly until there was just 1.5" of the old yarn left.  Then, I tied that to the new yarn which I had doubled, and kept going with the decreases till there were only two left.  I used my needle to thread it through the last two loops, and brought the tail to the inside, and aggressively tacked the ends in.  I know it's a little pointy.  But I didn't want to risk the stitches coming loose again, and hey, it's supposed to look like a football. 

The inside:

I brought it in Jan 2 and was glad to see out of our skeleton crew that the dad was in that day.  So glad I finished it the night before, as his two year old was missing his hat.  Here Jake is modeling with the it: