Adventures In Cranial Weatherization
A number of years ago, I made a few versions of something called the 1898 Hat. This is a free pattern that you can get here on Ravelry. The designer constructed the pattern by looking at a picture from a 1910 magazine. I believe it was part of the charitable knitting drive meant for knitters to provide wooly warmth for soldiers and sailors during wartime. So I think of it as a sailor’s hat. I might not have those details exactly correct, but I like that narrative in my head, so that’s what I’m going with.
The hat is so darn clever. It’s first knit flat in garter stitch, with some clever increases/decreases at two points for the ears. Then the length is grafted or stitched into a circle and folded in half. Then stitches are picked up from both the edges (that are being held together) and knit upwards into a hat. The end result is a close-fitting cap that has a double-thickness brim with expanded sections to cup around and cover the ears. Genius! The cap in this picture is the one I made for myself.
Now, my personal experience with this hat is that, as I wear it, it works its way upward and doesn’t stay in position over my ears for very long, so I don’t often wear the hat. If I make it again, I’ll add a few rows of height before decreasing for the top. But I did get to thinking…wouldn’t this idea work well for a headband that specifically warms the ears? Turns out, the answer is yes. This is how I did it:
I’m not going to spell out every step in detail, because you can easily look up the pattern for yourself. But I started by casting on my initial 27 stitches in waste yarn, knitting a few rows in stockinette, and then joining in my main yarn (which was a lovely heathered purple in Cascade 220). I also did not slip the very first stitch on the very first row, because that would make it harder to graft or sew or in some other way join the ends together when the project was mostly finished. Other than that, I followed the instructions as given up to a certain point. Basically, the band starts at the back of the head, comes around to the left ear and expands then contracts; then you continue on knitting a bunch of rows to go over the forehead and around to the right ear. Once you’ve done the ear cup for the right ear, you knit a little more until you are again at the back of the head and then join the ending row to the beginning row.
As you knit back and forth in garter stitch, there are 3 stitches in the center of each row that are knit on the right side, and slipped on the wrong side. This gives you what looks like a stockinette ridge right up the middle of your work and when you fold the work in half later along this ridge, it looks exactly like an applied i-cord edging.
On my first attempt at this, I was sort of “trying it on” as I went, by which I mean I was putting the starting edge at the back of my head and trying to stretch the headband around to make sure it fit. I don’t know why I was doing this…the hat I made fits perfectly in the brim area, so I don’t know why I thought things might be different now. Nevertheless, I decided that the space between the ears and over the forehead wasn’t long enough and for the first version of this, I added 12 rows (6 garter stitch ridges). This seemed fine at the time, and it was only later that I was informed this was a bad idea. But more about that later.
Once the knitting was done and I was ready to join it into a circle, I laid it out on the table to have a look at it. When laid flat, the ear cups look very odd. But when folded in half into its actual configuration, you can clearly see how the shaping has worked.
I opted to use a three needle bind-off to join the beginning of the work to the end. This means that I kept my live stitches on one needle, worked the other needle into the bottom of the beginning stitches (as held and shown by my waste yarn), and then used a crochet hook to knit the two rows together and cast off at the same time.
Once that was done, I folded everything in half and prepared to attach the two sides together into what would look like one layer. I’d initially planned to do an attached i-cord for this, and in fact I started to do it. But I was only a little way in when I tested the stretch on the i-cord edge and was dismayed to discover that it had absolutely no stretch at all. This would not do. The whole band needed to stretch to fit around the head. I tore out the i-cord and had a bit of a think.
I ultimately ended up doing a single crochet edging through both layers, which turned out to be sufficiently stretchy. I needed to use a crochet hook that was a bit smaller than my knitting needles (over 1/2 mm smaller, actually), but it worked fine and it looked nice. Here’s a short video of what that looks like in motion:
The only problem was that the crochet edging stood out slightly from the rest of the headband, as you can see in this picture. I’m not stretching the edge at all. It stands away from the head on its own. However, this doesn’t matter in the slightest when it’s being worn (on a real head, not this undersized mannequin head) because everything stretches and lays flat.
Now, I gifted this hat to a friend of mine (let’s call her Tatiana) and she wore it when she was out and about working. She loved the way that it cupped her ears and kept them warm without making her whole head too hot. However, she said that it kept slipping down her forehead and over her eyes. Clearly, the extra rows I’d put in over the forehead were a mistake.
I made another in a darker purple, this time using KnitPicks’ washable wool yarn Swish. And I knit the pattern-approved number of rows over the forehead. And it fits perfectly and doesn’t fall down. I guess the pattern designer really does know better than I. What a shocker.
Side note: I mentioned to Titania how great she (and really, everyone) looked in the rich purple color. She informed me that all “old people” (she’s my age) liked purple. I had to thank her for ruining the color for me. What are friends for…
I kept the original headband for myself and, by dint of pushing it a little farther back on my forehead, managed to keep it from falling down over my eyes. That double layer of garter stitch in a soft wool yarn with those ear cups really does keep your ears sumptuously warm. It’s a great design and so cozy to wear…
The pattern, as I have executed it, takes about 60 grams of worsted weight yarn. Which means just over half of the Cascade 220 skein, and just slightly more than one skein of the Swish yarn.
I might have bought a few other colors of Swish so that all of the ladies in my family have matching headbands…
