RUMI Hat: Dragon Braid
I thought a lot about how to do Rumi’s braid and looked at lots of pictures online. We are sticklers for accuracy in this house so I knew it had to look perfect.
I considered making it out of some kind of foam and crocheting around it, but I’ll be honest: That sounds like a LOT of tedious work. Maybe it would be easier with some kind of knitting machine, but I don’t have one! Also, the yarn looking like hair is the look I’m going for. Crocheted tubes just isn’t the same.
I only used a partial skein of the Lilac yarn to make the hat, so I used the rest of that skein plus an entire additional skein for the braid. This ultimately made the braid very heavy, which is a problem I will address later.
To cut the yarn for the braid, I actually wrapped it around a couple of my dining chairs so I had a big continuous loop and then tied it and one end and cut it at the opposite end so I had a thick fistful of long pieces doubled over in half. I’m going to be making another one of these this week, so I will update this post with pics when I do.
In studying Rumi’s braid, I noticed that it seems to be a dragon braid made with 4 strands. I watched this video on YouTube from EverydayHairInspiration to refresh my memory on how to do a dragon braid.
The tie in the middle naturally divides the “hair” into 2 sections, which works well for the 4-stranded dragon braid. From the top where the bundle is tied to the ends, it was about 55 inches. It was so long that I had to hang it from the top of a cabinet door to work on it.
You’ll notice that in the video she uses little hair ties all along the braid and I tried doing it without that, but the braid was not very sturdy. What I ended up doing (because putting those tiny hair ties on this giant braid was not in the cards) was ordering some purple zip ties and using those in place of the hair ties, which resulted in a much sturdier dragon braid. I used a large hair clip to hold the strands I wasn’t working with while I put the zip ties on. When I was done, I snipped the long tails off the zip ties with a fingernail clipper so that I wouldn’t accidentally also cut some of the yarn.
I have attached the braid to the hat at 3 or 4 spots so far simply by running a short length of yarn from the inside of the hat through the braid and then knotting it inside the hat. I wanted to keep the attachments minimal in case I want to take off the braid and rework it.
Spoiler alert: I want to rework it.
As I’ve mentioned, this is just the first of these hats I’ve made and I anticipate making a couple more to figure it out. Right now this braid is so heavy that it pulls the hat off the back of the wearer’s head, so clearly adjustments need to be made. I will add updates here as I make them!