Put a hat on it.

I’ve decided I love hats. And now I have a little tiny head to make hats for and she’s absolutely adorable in hats! But this post is about the hat I made myself last summer.

Last April I made myself a new hat. And I love that hat. It’s a great squish-in-the-purse hat. It keeps my ears and nose out of the sun. It’s fun fabric. The only problem is that I can only wear it when my hair is down, which is pretty much never because of the heat, or when my hair is in a braid, which is often. The majority of the time, however, my hair is back in a bun. And wearing a hat with a bun is pretty much impossible. Unless I want to pull out my pioneer style hat (check out the very last photo on the post), which is, admittedly, a fun hat, but not really one I’m going to wear around town often.

So I needed a hat I could wear with my hair in a bun. An extensive internet search (i.e. a quick google search) showed me that one person had found a solution for the problem – they made a regular sun hat and cut a hole in the back. Which is, admittedly, a solution. However, I figured there had to be a better solution. What if I wanted to wear my hat when I didn’t have a bun? Would I have to make two hats in the same fabric, one with a hole and one without? So I thought some more.

As I pondered I thought about how I wear a baseball hat with a pony tail. I just pull my hair through the hole. If I really wanted to, I could probably undo the sizing thing on the baseball hat and then redo it under a bun and wear it that way. Ah ha! I’m heading in the right direction. Now I just had to figure out how to make a sun hat act like a baseball hat.

I used McCalls 3625 (which has gone out of print since I bought it) for my last hat. One of the other views seemed like it might be what I was looking for. I needed to make the brim overlap in the back so I could open and close it like the sizing band on a baseball hat. And I needed the back to be able to lift up for a bun or down for a braid.

The cap portion of style E on this pattern is made of a center piece that runs from the front to the back and two side pieces. I extended it on the back about an inch or so and stopped connecting it to the side pieces about an inch and a half up from the brim (where the tabs on the pattern happened to be, perfect!).

The brim pattern was all one piece cut on the fold, but that wouldn’t give me enough of an overlap if I extended that. So I cut the brim in three pieces. The front piece was cut on the fold and extended around to the sides. And then I cut two back pieces that had long tabs I free handed the shape for.

I sewed the lining (leaving a hole for turning later) and the hat the same rather than following the separate lining instructions as written in the pattern. Then I sewed them together at the edge of the brim and turned it right side out through the hole I left. I stitched around the edge of the brim with some top stitching and added some bias tape with a thin piece of plastic boning running through it to stabilize the brim. I stitched in the ditch where the cap meets the brim to keep everything together.

To finish the hat I attached five snaps – two to connect the cap to the brim at the back for when I’m wearing it closed, and three on the tabs to close them up. There is one on the end of each tab and one in the middle.

To wear the hat I unsnap everything, fold the back center up inside the hat and then snap it around my bun. It stays on great. The snaps are easy to do. And I can still wear it with my hair down too just by closing up the hole in the back.

:sun: Now my ears, nose, and throat are all protected from the crazy hot sun we get here and my hair is still off my neck when I want it to be.