Impromptu
Have you ever found yourself in need of a hair elastic? I’m guessing many of you have. Have you ever found yourself in need of a hair elastic and been far away from either your personal stash or a convenient place to get more? This doesn’t happen to me often (I tend to go for the long, loose, and lazy approach to hair styling), but it did on this trip. For you see, I needed to use a handy power tool, and it was windy. Very very windy. And everyone knows long hair and power tools and wind don’t mix.
So I did what any knitter would do, I knit a hair elastic. It was actually faster to knit one that to drive into town and buy one. Much more entertaining too. It started like this.
And a bit later it looked like this.
And after an hour and a half of using the aforementioned tools in high winds, it looked something like this.
Nothing if not stylish, hmmm? The idea here is that it actually worked. It wasn’t quite as grippy as a traditional elastic, but that’s after some heavy use, and it was still in there. More importantly, neither I nor the saw suffered any unfortunate accidents (and as for why I needed a saw, we’ll get into that later…I have A Plan).
So, on the off chance any of you find yourselves needing such a thing, try this:
1) Using a provisional cast on, cast on 4.
2) Working in icord throughout, knit 1 round.
3) Purl 3 rounds, knit 3 rounds.
4) Work those 6 rounds until it’s almost as long as you’d like (it will need to be longer than you think as it doesn’t cinch up as much as regular elastic).
5) Purl 3 rounds, knit 1 round.
6) Break yarn, leaving a 6 inch tail, kitchner the provisional cast on and the last row together.
7) Weave in your ends, using the tails to bring your cast on round and your kitchnered round together into a tube like the rest of your icord.
Voila. Ready for your next daring adventure.
Genius! It looks beautiful too. I wonder would it be stretchier if you used garter stitch?
I tried garter and it didn’t look very nice, though it was a bit stretchier. I settled on the 3×3 as it gave a bit of extra stretch and grip, but still looked good.
Gosh, this sounds like a fun way to use bits of yarn, make matching bands…especially for children. Maybe it would be a good way to start children knitting with a simple project.
Oddly enough, it’s actually got a lot of fiddly bits (provisional cast on, icord, kitchnering to your provisional cast on), so I’m not sure it would be a good fit to teach someone to knit. Might be a simpler variation you could do (with something like a knitting spool and just knotting the ends) though…
what about threading elastic through the middle or knitting over some elastic?
Hmmm, yeah, you could totally run a strand of elastic through the icord before you kitchner it together. Then tie it up and tighten it and trim the ends, kitchner, and tuck your elastic ends in. Then kitchner and deal with our yarn ends.
That would totally work.
This was a spur of the moment thing, and I didn’t have any with me (if I had I’d likely just have used that), but it could totally work if someone wanted to make one a bit more intentionally!