First Post-Dress Project

As you might imagine, after devoting the last few months to work on the dress, I've had a lot of other sewing projects queueing up in my sewing room. There were shirts and dresses for my nephews and nieces (Christmas presents), gifts for some friends' new babies, and even a couple of outfits for myself! ;)

As you also might imagine, the first thing I wanted to work on was anything QUICK and EASY! So, last weekend I selected this pattern:

My friend, Ani, had picked out the middle hat on the right for her young niece, Alicita. You might notice that all of the children in the picture are boys, but we figured that we could "girl it up" with the right fabric...

Ani selected a stretch pink corduroy for the outside of the hat and an adorable soft flannel - white with pink butterflies - for the lining. It came together in just a couple of hours and looks pretty cute on my Build-A-Bear.

(I don't really collect stuffed animals. I have "Joy" as a model for the outfits that I make for my nieces' stuffed bears. The fact that she has a name is totally coincidental and meaningless...)

The pattern was pretty simple. There were just 3 things that I felt could have been done differently.

Easing the two main hat pieces together around the curves was reasonable with the stretch corduroy, but not so easy with the flannel. So, I ended up adding basting stitches and doing some light gathering before pinning and sewing those pieces together.

I used pretty stiff interfacing for the brim and it was difficult to turn the seam allowance up and into the hat. I wish I had trimmed the interfacing so that it didn't extend into the seam allowance before attaching it.

For some reason the instructions actually had adding the snap (to attach the brim to the front of the hat) as the LAST step. In hindsight, I think it would have been much easier to sew on the snap BEFORE attaching the lining to the hat or sewing the two brim pieces together...

Other than that, it was exactly what the doctor ordered - almost immediate gratification! Hopefully I'll get a picture of Alicita modeling it someday...