As the weather got colder I noticed that teenagers had started wearing panda face hats.

I decided to design a pink panda snood for girls.

I took some measurements of a girl’s head in the age group I would be knitting for, so I knew how big the tube would need to be to fit over the girl’s head and necks, I didn’t want it to tight.

I picked the wool I wanted to knit it in.  The most important task now was to knit a sample to see how many stitches I would need for the snood to come out the size I wanted.

A rough guide to know the size of needles to use is look on the ball band, I know I knit loosely so need at least 1 size mm smaller that the ball band suggests.

I started by casting on 20 sts in 3 3/4mm needles and stocking stitched 4″.  I can then count how many sts there are across 4″ of my sample.

It is just a simple sum to calculate how many stitches I will need to use for the garment to come out the size I require.

I decided I wanted a rolled edge, so cast on the required stitches on size 3mm needles and stocking stitched 8 rows before changing to 3 3/4mm needles for the main.

I needed to sticking stitch till where I wanted to start the panda eyes to start, I could by now measure how many rows there was over 4″.  I measured how wide I wanted the total width of the eyes to cover to centralise them on the snood and counted the stitches.  Then measured how long I wanted the eyes to be to keep them in proportion, I could then mark the number of stitches and rows out on my squared paper, and make a rough sketch on the paper.

I went over the rough sketch shading in all the squares that were majority inside the eye area.  I now had my chart for knitting the eyes on my snood.

I wanted the snood to be comfy both worn scrunched down round the neck or pulled up in the cold, so I only made small two tone pom pom’s for the ears.

I over sewed the darker pink for the eyes.

All in all I was happy with the end results.

I know one of the girls kept their snood on ALL Christmas day.

Brilliant end result then!