Isolated in her inaccessible tower room, Rapunzel never enjoyed an education, informal or otherwise, but she was bright and she learned from observation. To be sure, it was the witch who had taught her to braid her hair and twist the braid around a hook before letting it down so that the braid was secure and unmoving when the witch climbed up, but it was Rapunzel who had discovered that this also saved her own head from being yanked around. Unfortunately this was because she had forgotten to anchor it one day when letting a forest creature into her safe haven!
Easing the strain, however, did not prevent the terrible headaches she got from constantly catching her tresses on everything that protruded from walls or furnishings in her tiny room.
One day she was watching as a spider created a web horizontally from the washstand to the towel rail. No sooner had the spider finished and retreated to the end of the longest thread, than with a scrunch, a piece of the stone from the ceiling above sheared off and fell right in the middle of the web. Rapunzel felt for sure the stone would go straight through the delicate fabric, but no, it bounced and fell back on the web, forming a hammock shape in this perfect little piece of engineering.
Rapunzel looked at this little net hammock and wondered whether something like this would keep her hair tidy and secure when the hair wasn't in use as a ladder. But she had nothing with which to make a little hammock, neither thread nor tools.
Rapunzel had noticed that the witch tended to be much easier to talk to before her climb up to the tower window, which left the witch breathless and grumpy. So the next morning when the witch was tending her herb garden, Rapunzel called down and asked her if she knew how she could make something, like a spider's web, to keep her hair from getting tangled. The witch looking up, professed that this was a great idea and Rapunzel should learn to knit her own snood. Puzzled, Rapunzel looked questioningly at the witch. Forgetting, in her good mood, how one thing tends to lead to another, the witch cast the spell to beat all spells. Suddenly Rapunzel found herself, not only with needles and yarn, but with the knowledge and expertise to knit whatever her heart desired. The snood came first, then the tube to serve as a rope to get herself down from the tower. Wait for a prince....no way!
If we can rely on the fashion historians, snoods have been in existence since at least the 1500s. Great for bad hair days, they may be designed to cover your hair completely, to form part of a decorative wedding headdress, or to just cover a bun. They can be created of fabric to act as a chemo cap. They're just the neatest head covering when a hat or scarf won't do!
In the 1940s snoods were a fashionable and useful alternative to the hair net in the work place. To make a simple 1940s style snood, choose your favourite lacy pattern and knit a rectangle 8 inches by the length you want it to fall from the crown of your head, plus 3 or more inches (depending on the thickness of your hair) for turn up at the back.
To finish, fold in half lengthwise and seam the sides. Gather one half of the open end using tubular elastic and the other (the top) with two pieces of ribbon which can be tied with a bow (or not!) at the crown of your head. This design will probably need to be anchored with hair grips.
[Edit: those gorgeous swatches were knit in Adriafil Brio Fantasy, and the stitch is a simple yo, k2tog repeat. "Just be sure that on the following row the wool
forward stitch always becomes the second on the needle in the k2tog," says Hazel.]
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