I love winter for the abundance of rosy cheeks, warm drinks and knitted goods. This year I haven’t been up to much knitting and instead have turned my attention to sewing, but for some reason this winter I’m hard to find without a ball of yarn in my lap. Maybe it’s the portability of each project. It could be that it’s much easier to fix knitting than sewing projects if I mess up (which can be frequent at times). Or maybe it’s just because knitting happens to be one of the best winter activities, second to making soup and baking bread in our cozy kitchen.
This Christmas my sister asked if “maybe… just if you don’t have something for me yet and it’s not a big deal…. could you knit me a winter headband with flowers on it?” Even though I had her all taken care of I wasn’t about to say no to an opportunity to knit something else for her. It’s really quite nice to be asked.
I asked her to find some pictures of headbands she liked and we checked out the slew of bands that seem to have hit the stores. We checked out some knit in the round, some that tapered at the bottom and some that buttoned to close. In a compromise of experimenting with a pattern, knitting on the fly and being kind of lazy I made a tapered band using two strands of Jo Sharp Silkroad DK Tweed. I skipped the button holes though and decided to seam it up at the base.
I knit this one up in about an hour and a half, then found even chunkier yarn and knit up a second in about 45 minutes so she could have options. For both I gradually increased stitches from the base of the headband, then decreased as I neared the end. The edges are knit in garter stitch and the center of the band is knit in stockinette. I held it to my head as I knit, measuring loosely as I went along. The flowers are knit by casting on about 80 stitches (more for a bigger flower, less for a smaller flower) and knitting regularly on knit rows, and sharply decreasing the width of the piece by knitting two stitches together on every purl side (so you have 80 the first time, decrease to 40, then to 20, 10 and then 5 before casting off).
For such a quick and brainless project I actually really like the way it turned out. Just don’t take my picture at face value — knits photograph miserably in our home. They always look kind chintzy to me. There’s no stitch definition, no depth. But chintzy-looking in the picture or not, it’s warm, cozy and quick. You might want to knit one too.
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