Sewing Some Shade

I've been doing some sewing in between knitting on my numerous wip's the past few days, making bucket style hats for both kids.  I found a great tutorial for Destructo boy's hat here on the U-Create blog, and for Lil' Miss I used a free pattern provided by Simplicity.  Both worked out pretty well, but in both cases I screwed up had some issues, so had to make judicious use of my seam ripper.

gotta love little boys

Something went wonky with both of the hats, different patterns but both had the same problems (hmm, perhaps sewer error?!).  I surmise some of my trouble had to do with the fact that the seams are supposed to be 1/2" in both patterns, but when I did that the hat wouldn't fit around the kids heads even when using the appropriate size.  So I seam ripped both the hats apart and did a 1/4" seam, it fit around the head then but came out rather tall, so I had to cut down the fabric on the sides of the hats about 3/4" (of course found this out after the brim had been attached resulting in more seam ripping, sigh).  You'd think I'd learn the first time too about the circumference of the hat being an issue wouldn't you?  Sadly this was not the case.  Mind you, for Lil' Misses hat I was trying to distract myself from the migraine nipping at my heels so my patience level which is naturally rather low was even worse than normal resulting in the fury frustration with the sizing issues being somewhat blown out of proportion.

Lil' Miss opted for the brim to be the reverse fabric, cute idea missy!

In spite of the problems, I got both patterns to work in the end and both kids now have rather cute reversible hats for the summer (if I do say so myself).  For Destructo boy's hat I even did the seams every 1/4" across the whole brim to give it a little more rigidity since I only used one layer of interfacing.  Now that I have conquered these patterns and understand how they work I am already thinking of making more for the monkeys, have to keep an eye on the remnants section at the fabric store!