Valhalla's Things — A Pair of Hair Towel Wraps

Two trapezoid shaped hoods made out of off-white towels: one is
still looking new, while the other one has been bleached and
roughened by having been washed many times.

Many months ago I had been ordering some furniture from IKEA¹ and on one of those orders I got tempted by a hair towel wrap: it mostly worked as an idea, but it was too short for my hair.

On the other hand, I had two old towels I wasn’t using, and a recently unpacked sewing machine.

A towel cut in two trapezoid halves with a STJÄRNBUSKE laid on
top of it: the IKEA wrap is a bit less than 10 cm less deep, and
at least 30 cm shorter, and is also triangular rather than a
trapezoid.

I didn’t plan too much, I just put the STJÄRNBUSKE over the towel, cut, realized that the two pieces didn’t fit with right sides together, cut the second towel (I had planned to make two wraps, anyway, so it wasn’t a big deal), and started sewing by machine in what seemed like a reasonable procedure, taking notes and pictures.

A towel, with its original care label, that has been cut in a
trapezoid shape and reassembled into a hood shape with a long
triangular tail. The machine sewn finishing is still neat and
pristine.

The result was pretty good, and I started using it every time I washed my hair, but then I started to entertain the idea of shooting myself sewing the second one by hand for a video, but never found the time to actually doing it, and the pieces remained in the Pile for months, and months, and way more than a year.

The head of a woman with a turban-like thing on the head,
covering all of the hair except for a tiny bit at the center
front.

Until one day I bought a meter of cotton cheesecloth (mostly because it was almost cheaper than buying a sample) and it felt like a good material to make a nicely looking head wrapper, to keep my hair out of the way when needed.

A woman in a bathrobe with her head tilted downwards, covered
by a towel thing that lies on the back of the head and has a long
tail hanging on the front, in the process of being wrapped around
the hairs and then brought over the top and back.

A couple months later, it was finally time to bring this project to the top of the list, and even if I was sewing two by hand it went pretty quickly: we had a weekend when it was too hot to do anything else, and by the end of it the wraps were done.

All that remained was finish writing the instructions for my FreeSoftWear patterns website <https://sewing-patterns.trueelena.org/contemporary_unisex/headwear/hair_towel_wrap/index.html>>, and having some pictures taken, and this project was done.

And now, on to documenting a few more things I’ve done lately, and to start working on the other projects I have added to the queue in the meantime.

small things. Like, you know, a kitchen :D↩︎