Jasmin Headscarf (Headband)

As winter approaches (very slowly in South Central Texas), I decided to work on some head coverings. Since it doesn’t usually get super cold in Texas, and because I have a large mass of hair, I decided to go with something that would help control my hair without killing the curls, but also could be pulled over my ears to keep them warm.

I found the Jasmin Headscarf pattern in 25 Knitted Accessories to Wear and Share. And it can also be found in French Girl Knits. Both books are produced by Interweave. I was drawn to the leaf pattern and would have loved to have done it in green, but I ended up trying something a little different. I used two different yarns both of which I no longer have the information about.

The silver is what I believe to be a bamboo blend, at least the yarn looks similar to bamboo blends I’ve used in the past.  This particular yarn had been used in another project by my mom and I was just using two partial skeins that had been made into cakes.  The blue is some sort of ribbon yarn that was originally meant for a shawl, which I lost the pattern for and I decided to just trash the project and either use the yarn for something else or donate it to Goodwill as I’m not very fond of novelty yarns.

However, after searching around on Ravelry I saw that a lot of people used the ribbon yarns in combination with regular yarns and the effect looked quite interesting, so I decided to see how my wintery leaf headscarf would look.

I will say, the images in the book did not do the headscarf justice as to how large it actually was. I started out doing the pattern as called out, but realized that it was going to be massive, so instead of doing all the repeats of the pattern, I just did it as charted without adding repeats of the leaves across the middle.

This is a pattern that probably should be blocked, especially if doing the full repeats, but I found that when worn this modified pattern is pretty visible as it stretches out. I’m pretty happy with the results. I did have to take apart one end when I realized how stretchy it was and needed to shorten it. So now I have a small ball of of both yarns together, which I’m thinking about trying and doing a baby headband with and just breaking the middle of the headband into a single line of alternating leaves instead of two leaves.

The other change I did make to my pattern was that instead of doing two halves of the headscarf and then using a kitchner stitch to put them together, I just continued the leaves all in the same direction so that I wasn’t doing as many new things, since I’d never done a provisional cast on before or the kitchner stitch.

I think at some point I will come back to this pattern and make it as designed, but I’ll be doing both halves at the same time for consistency in my knitting.