I never had much exposure to Wonder Woman growing up. My experience with superheros was primarily X-Men, Batman, and Spiderman from the cartoons on Fox Kids in the afternoons.

….and can we just take a moment to recognize how absolutely amazing the Fox Kids afternoon line up was through the years? I mean: Spiderman, X-Men, Batman, The Tick, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Goosebumps, Eek the Cat, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, Round the Twist, the Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog…

When Wonder Woman burst onto the scene, accompanied by her killer theme music in the otherwise so-so Batman vs. Superman, I was intrigued. But when I saw the teaser trailer of the Wonder Woman movie I was completely  hooked. We went to see it opening weekend and it completely lived up to the hype. It was an incredible experience to see so many strong women dominating the screen. I teared up when Diana crossed no-man’s land like a bad-ass.

I gladly jumped on the bandwagon by knitting the amazing Wonder Woman wrap by Carissa Browning, with fabulous yarn from the Twisted Purl in Conway, AR.

I desperately wanted my own Wonder Woman tiara… and when there was a pre-Thanksgiving sale at HerUniverse, I caved and got, not only a tiara, but the dress as well, and wore all my Wonder Woman accouterments to see “Justice League”.

I also looked at this as an opportunity to learn double-knitted shaping and thus exponentially increase my potentiality when it comes to patterns 🙂 and thus the “We are All Wonder Women (when we knit)” headband pattern was begun!

It was a simple concept, a band of double knitting with a small triangular section of shaping in the middle for the star pattern.

I theoretically knew how to decrease double-knitted stitches but it was a completely different ball game to try to think out how best to design this headband (knit long ways or short ways, where and how to bind off, how does all this affect the double knitted shaping stitches…) and how to translate that onto a chart.

Excel again came to the rescue and I decided to knit along the length of the headband and thereby only have decrease stitches in the middle “star” section.  I measured my head and calculated the approximate number of stitches I would need to cross my forehead as well as overlap an elastic headband and jumped in!

It went surprisingly smoothly! I did add in 2 rows of solid color along the top after I started because I began to fear that the band would be too narrow to give it structure but otherwise my theoretical pattern came out with very little alterations needed.  I did my best to write out the color changes and decrease of the “star” section as well, to make it as easy as possible to follow, and tried to follow my written instructions rather than the chart (which I’m more comfortable with) when test knitting to make sure that it produced something identical to the chart.

My only oops moment was realizing that since the star section was so small I had placed my decreases along the very edge, meaning that there was no easy way (that I knew of at that time) to seal the edges- like I’d normally do by slipping stitch pairs or knitting stitches together on a rectangular scarf. So I had to tack the edges together after the fact so that they didn’t flap open and I resolved that next time I design a shaped/ double-knitted piece, I would leave a selvage stitch pair on the edges at all times to make sealing easier!

So if you’re feeling empowered, go out there and do some good in the world, because Remember: We are ALL Wonder Women (or Men!) when we knit! 🙂