Medusa Barrette by corvus corone corone
Guidelines for your snakey hair accsssssssessssssssssory
This is not a pattern per se, these guidelines rather call for your own personal creativity. It is not a step-by-step pattern! You need: Yarn (duh!), colour dependent on taste. I used black and dark greens. It's perfect for using up all those odd bits of left-over yarn. Contrasting or complimenting yarns for belly scales (optional) Some red yarn for the tongues (optional) 6 mm beads for the eyes (I used red, green, and black) Chenille pipe-cleaners, ca. 9 mm in diameter, up to 50 cm long, in roughly the same colours as the yarns Metal (aluminium) bells (6 mm) Crimp beads or other tiny tinkly metal beads (optional) i-cord maker (if you are lazy like me) knitting needles (I used 2 mm needles) sewing thread darning needle metal barrette, length depending on your hair volume (mine was 8 cm long)
You can do i-cords in the old-fashioned way. I hate that, so I used a 4- needle-strong i-cord maker. It would be cool to have different width snakes, but I just used slightly different yarn gauges. Start making i-cords. For the base make 2 i-cords, roughly 30 cm long, braid them into an “eternal celtic knotwork style knot" and sew the ends closed.
The celtic knotwork should be about a centimetre longer than the barrette and rather loosely braided, because the snakes will be sewn behind it, and it has to be a little stretchy. Now start making more i-cords of varying lengths, sizes, colours (roughly between 15 and 35 cm long), leaving a long tail to start with and making it a couple of cm longer than you intend it to be. Now, and this is important: Unravel BOTH ends, take up the stitches with your knitting needles (or place them onto waste yarn), take a darning needle and thread the chenille pipe-cleaners onto it, then stuff the i-cords with the pipe cleaners, leaving about a cm of pipe-cleaner looking out of both ends. Now knit a snake head onto each end. I usually increased the 4 stitches to 8 in the first row, knitted roughly 3 rows, increased to 10 or 12, knitted another 2 or 3 rows and then started decreasing quickly or less quickly (k2tog or k3tog), depending on how pointy I wanted the heads. Sometimes I increased more stitches in the first row, to make a cobra-like head that flattens out and is broader than an adder's head for example. If I wanted belly scales I embroidered them on with contrasting or complimenting yarn by simple, basic darning stitch (snake belly scales are rectangular and run parallel at an angle of 9o degrees to the vertebral column).
Then sew on eyes and tongue. I made two only one-headed long snakes, to have them peer over my shoulder like my personal pets or to have them hang down my back.
Make a couple of (I made 4. Less is more in this case...) short i-cords to serve as tails (8 to 12 cm), fill them with pipe-cleaners and sew both ends closed. Now for the rattle tails, take 5 bells: Pry the bells apart (see photo of “things you need" further up) with a tool, except for the last one, so you can stack them onto each other. Thread them onto sewing thread with an intact bell at the end, put a metal crimp or other bead in between each bell (to make it more tinkly) and then sew the rattle onto the end of a tail.
Now take the celtic knotwork, the snakes, the barrette, all your courage, and your creative eye, and arrange the snakes on the back of the knotwork, first roughly sewing it to the knot and when you are sure you like the arrangement, sew it on for real, and then sew it onto the barrette. Don't forget the two or more “pets" :D Make sure the snakes curl in an aesthetically pleasing way ;) and now wear it with all your musterable drama-queen pride! You are Medusa! I hope you'll have fun making and wearing this! Do let me know how it went!
