Braided Headband Knitting Pattern

The best way to learn any new skill in knitting is to try it on a small project, preferably something that doesn’t have to be perfect in terms of size.

I love using scarves as learning projects, but if you want something a little smaller you can try a washcloth. Or if you’d rather make something you can wear even as you’re learning new skills, headbands and earwarmers are great projects for that.

These little projects don’t take a lot of yarn or time to knit. They don’t have to fit exactly perfectly because they can stretch (and heads come in lots of different sizes). And they give you a little canvas to play with stitch patterns, colorwork and other kinds of knitting techniques.

In this case, a little cable.

The braided headband pattern from Mirella Moments uses worsted weight yarn and has a braided cable running down the middle. There are smaller cables on each side and a bit of garter stitch edging to hold it all together. The little side cables are so small you can even use them to practice working cables without a cable needle.

The pattern comes in one size but should fit a variety of heads. If you want to make it smaller or larger you can just subtract or add length as you go. The project is knit flat and seamed into a circle when the knitting is done.

Once you get the hang of it, this pattern would make a great gift knit, or you could donate them to charity in the winter months.

You can grab the free pattern from Mirella Moments.

Looking for more easy cable knitting patterns? I love this cable knit hat as a beginner cable project, or you can check out my collection of cable knitting patterns to boost your skills.

[Photo: Mirella Moments]

Looking for more Knitted Headband Patterns? Check these patterns out on Etsy. Headbands are a great gift idea as they knit up fast and are well received by friends and family. Everyone loves wearing Knit headbands right? Check out this free knitted Autumn Ear Warmer headband on our sister site.

When I was looking around for free knitting patterns to share recently, I came across this fun leopard print wrap from Yarnspirations.

This fun bulky wrap gives you tons of practice with instarsia and makes a bold statement while keeping you warm. It’s rated for intermediate knitters and the design is charted but pretty easy to follow. And it’s only 50 rows and worked in bulky yarn, so it wouldn’t even take that long to knit. (You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.)

So what’s the problem? The yarn that the pattern calls for has been discontinued, and it’s not a yarn that a substitute for immediately springs to mind.

The original yarn was Patons Alpaca Blend, a single ply bulky yarn that was a combination of acrylic, superwash wool, nylon and alpaca.

My first thought was Lion Brand Hue + Me, which is an acrylic and wool blend, with two plies instead of a single. It looks like it has the colors you would need to make this fun shawl.

But as I was thinking about it, I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce you to YarnSub if you don’t already know about it. This website is a giant database of yarn that can consider the qualities of the yarn you want to substitute and offer potential substitutions.

It’s not only thinking about yarn weight, like I was, but also fiber content, number of plies, gauge and even the difference in yardage between one ball and another. It even looks at the price and can be filtered by your price range or preferences about fiber content (if, say, you’re sensitive or allergic to wool, for example, or don’t want to you acrylic).

When I plugged in Alpaca Blend, it gave me a lot of different options, though many of them were self-striping or multicolored, which wouldn’t work for this project, and I don’t see a way to filter for solid colors only.

Still, it’s a good tool to give you some ideas you might not know about or might have forgotten about, and it tells you how the new yarn is similar to the old one and how it differs, allowing you to make smarter choices when substituting yarns.

[Photo: Yarnspirations]

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