Yeah, so my morning began with being abruptly woken up by the shrill screams of betrayal and discontent. My blurry dry eyeballs adjusted to the trauma of sleep interruption and I walked like a zombie in an old-lady cardigan downstairs to find out what crime had been committed.
Welcome to my morning.
I arrived on the first floor to see a crying Bub and a gleeful Mister Baby Pants. Still in my typical morning haze, I drifted towards wherever the coffee scent was wafting from. My wonderful husband handed me my morning coffee and I sat down at the dining table sipping my way to awakedness. You know. Because coffee.
He then told me the reason for the crying was that The Bub’s hat had been intentionally torn up by Mister Baby Pants.
“What hat?”
“That hat.”
This wasn’t where I found the hat, but this IS what it looked like:
A hot torn up paper mess.
You see, The Bub had recently been to a “cooking school” birthday party where he received not only a great kid’s apron, but this paper hat to wear, while all the attending children assembled their own individual pizzas and decorated mini birthday cakes.
Anyway, now this hat had bitten the dust.
I sat drinking my coffee, wondering if I could possibly shrink down just small enough to scale the handle and dive in head first into my mug.
Then The Bub entered the room with a pouty bottom lip, big enough to double as an emergency floatation device, and told me about the heinous crime that had been committed at the crack of dawn.
“I heard, Bub! But you know what we can do? How would you like one of these hats made out of fabric so Mister Baby Pants can’t rip it up?”
Somebody’s face lit up brighter than the sun.
“Today? Can I have it today??”
“We’ll see. I don’t know when, but I’ll make one for you.”
So The Bub went off to school and I decided I had better make this replacement hat before anything else on my schedule, or else I was likely to forget or lose interest in the idea completely. I wondered if there was a quick tutorial on one in the internet universe, so I did a quick search.
But what the heck kind of hat is this thing called? Ermmm.
Once I deciphered it could be considered a forage hat (okay, I’ve NEVER used that term before in my life and I know a LOT of esoteric terminology), I found a number of paper versions but no real fabric ones to speak of (the army style, yes, but not the 50s diner style). And as for tutorials, I found zip.
Using the destroyed one as a basic template, I cut out a bunch of pieces of scrap white fabric and lightweight interfacing, all about 3.5" x11" each. After some ironing, trimming, piping with bias binding and assembling, I came up with this:
Not too bad, considering I didn’t have much of a pattern to go on.
Before he left for school, The Bub lamented that the new hat wouldn’t have the same (whatever it was) logo on it.
“No problem! We can make our OWN logo!"
Just before leaving the house, he decided on his restaurant name and before he came back home, I found my trusty fabric pens:
I drew up a quick logo design for his restaurant name and left the pens out for him to embellish the rest of the hat as he saw fit.
Suffice it to say, he LOVES his new hat…AND it fits nicely (phew! Take that, I-Didn’t-Really-Bother-Measuring Gods!).
He colored it up, wrote all over it and wore it happily around the house for the rest of the evening. Sorry no pics of that; too much fun was had. You’ll just have to take my word on it.
….
And that concludes my Almost-Completely-Unrelated-to-Thanksgiving post of the week, unless of course you tie in the cooking factor and wearing proper head coverage while prepping your favorite meals. Forage hats for everyone! Just don’t let your family conversations devolve into your own hat ripping incidents. Because the results ain’t pretty.
Happy holiday week!