The Mad Hatter

Here's the hat I made for the Sewing Pattern Review Hat contest. I haven't written the SPR review yet, but I will (before Tuesday night, the deadline!!)

The pattern is my favorite skull cap, McCall's 4664. I've been wearing the plain aqua version quite a lot and when I saw this contest, I had this idea that I could make the hat again (since it must be made in the month of March) and then embellish it with flowers. Originally I was going to use the top most flower from Amy Butler's mum pillow, but I decided it was too large and too spikey. I then drew a few flowers til I wound up using the smaller size that I liked.

Love how I labelled one of my free-form flowers "good one". The spiky flower on the right is from Amy Butler's mum pattern; I decided not to use it.

Using my old hat as a guide for how many flowers I'd need; I really did make another aqua hat--on the left and upper portion of the picture are the cut-out pieces.

The flowers seemed plain without...something. So I cut leaves out of green fleece and centers out of aqua fleece and added beads from my grandmother's collection for the center.

Scrappy bits.

I started cutting out this hat around 10:30pm last night; I finished it around 9pm tonight. There are 60 flowers and centers and leaves and beads in total, all over the hat, front and back. The flowers, centers and leaves are all hand cut and hand sewn on.

If I had to do it over again, I'd interface the flowers so they wouldn't fray (I had white fleece but thought the contrast was too stark, so I used this cream colored flannel instead). And perhaps I'd make the layout of flowers more random.

Don't you like how I'm wearing my flower shirt with my flower hat?

I stuffed the hat for this shot.

Overhead view.

I have a whole album of poses--I need to decide which one I will choose for the main photo for my SPR contest!