Stephanie Klose

Last winter, a friend emailed a link to this gorgeous cashmere turban and suggested I knit one. I tried, but I had a really, really hard time reverse engineering it. There are a lot of elements in the mix; the bottom edge is clearly shaped and there’s a seam at the center back and the construction of that knotting was not immediately intuitive to me. Frankly, a year on, I’m still having a tough time wrapping my mind around it. It seems straightforward enough when I look at it, but when I try to understand the mechanics of the structure, I come up short. It’s like the Klein bottle of headwear. I’ve been keeping an eye on Ravelry to see if anything similar turned up, but most of the patterns there just looked a little … off. Either too self-consciously vintage or too sloppy or too all goddam wrong. Then last month, I stumbled upon Drops’ Edith Piaf pattern and figured I might as well give it a shot to grok the construction, if nothing else. I’d say I’m medium-happy with the results (though decidedly unhappy with this ghastly camera photo). I like the fit and that it’s evocative of a turban without looking like I wrapped a towel around my head. I do want to redo the band to make it smaller, but that’s easy enough since it’s knit separately and added after the main hat is done. I used two strands of sportweight alpaca I had around, so it’s soft and extremely warm. Is it the knit turban of my dreams? No. But it’s a nice enough hat to put into the winter rotation.