Osborn Fiber Studio

Some patterns just… happen, nearly of their own accord. This one was truly the lovechild of necessity and laziness.

Navarre Beach is a beautiful place – but it’s very windy. My haircut is that sort of reverse-mullet, short in back and long in front, which made it nearly impossible for me to read on the porch and beach with my bangs whipping every which way.

What I needed was a headband. I had leftover Zauberball from a project I’m not quite ready to talk about yet, and I had a few hundred pages of reading to do. So it had to be super-simple, and knit lengthwise – I’m not into going back and forth every ten stitches. If I had done that, I would have torn out all my hair by the time it was finished, which would at least solve my bang problem. I didn’t want to muck about with gauge, so I wanted it to tie in the back. That meant it had to have skinny ties, which in turn meant short rows. No prob, bob. This is what I came up with:

This could be the basic template for innumberable headband patterns. That middle band could be lace, or cables, or anything you could think of – just adjust the number of stitches in the middle band to suit your stitch pattern, and do an appropriate number of rows. It’s literally a one-row pattern, so you can make it as wide or narrow as you want, then bind off when you are happy with the size/become bored/run out of yarn.

Then I got clever. Why not make more than one band, so it can spread out over more of my hair without adding any more rows?

Or, to make the process even faster – just do a few stitches in the middle bit, and drop them all at the end.

By the end of the week, I had rather distractedly read most of one book, had three new watermelon-colored headbands, and a new excuse to not really brush my hair. What more could a girl want? Well, possibly more time on the beach.

I put this triad together into something resembling a pattern, and it’s free for your consumption on ravelry: http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/three-beach-bands Make wise and virtuous use of it.