Snow Hat- Boys

It's been fun with RJ's developing imagination lately- he's 2 1/2.

For example, the other day he told me: "Elves have red poop mom."

He earned a gummi worm, and never ate it, but carried it around all day telling me it wasn't candy, it was a dead worm.  He'd let me pet the dead worm, but that's all.  It was "his pet."

Yesterday morning he saw a Gap add as I was checking my email and they had these kid hats that were animals.  The shark was OK, but he really got excited about that red monster hat.  I thought the racoon was really cute too.

I remembered I had a kids winter hat pattern, and pulled it out.  I used McCalls M5772.  The pattern kind of looks cheesy, but they always do right?  I used version C for this hat.

He had specific ideas in mind for his monster, and this was so fun to make for him.

I showed him the red fleece I had in mind, but he picked out the orange fur from the rack of fabric.  I was surprised because I thought he'd want the red.  Everything has to be red lately, from his cup, shirts, pants, etc.

But he found the fur, I had kind of forgot I had it. It was $1 for probably 1.5 yards from a thrift store.

RJ actually picked/ planned most of it. I asked how many eyes his monster had, "just 2".

For the eyes, I told him to pick out a scrap and he chose the green.

He was really specific on having sharp teeth too.

He stood by me the majority of the time I was sewing, watching the monster come to life.  When he saw the mouth, he was jumping up and down--pretty exciting.

I didn't take pictures of the process, because I didn't know if it would turn out, and we were in a hurry with a toddler on the edge of his seat.  So here's what I did in case your little dude would love one too, or you have a little guy on your Christmas list.

The pattern is actually for fleece, but the faux fur had enough stretch I figured it would work.

I did line it with fleece though.

HORNS: Cut 4 fleece triangles that curved a little.  Sewed 2 together, trimmed the edges and turned them right side out and stuffed them with Polyfil fluffy batting.  I sewed them at the bottom of the side seams.

EYES: I hacked out 2 circles from scraps of white vinyl.  RJ chose a lime green scrap for the little irises.  I just straight stitched those on with a short stitch length, 1.0 I think.  Then I hand sewed the little black button pupils on each eye.  I had sewn the center seam of the hat at this point, and just straight stitched each eye on.  They are a little off, not intentional, but look like a scary monster I guess.

MOUTH: I cut a oblong piece of the charcoal fleece, then zig zagged the white triangle scraps on for teeth.  I attached the mouth with a straight stitch, then a small zig zag right on the edge.

At this point it was finished, and RJ told me he wanted "monster tails" too, the hanging pom-pom things.

TAILS: Looking at similar snow hats, most seemed to have braided yarn, with yarn pom-poms at the ends.  I didn't have any gray yarn, and was trying to think of things to hang at the end that weren't so feminine as yarn pom-poms.  So I ended up using the same gray fleece.  For the strings, I took 3 pieces of fleece: 1/2" wide and 10-12" long and braided them tightly.  I sewed all 3 pieces together on top of each other at the beginning and the end.

To make the "boy" pom-poms, I cut 2 pieces of fleece (4.5" x 6" each) into skinny 1/4" strips.  So a single pom-pom string was 4.5" tall and 1/4" wide.  I stacked them in a pile, then tied them really tightly around the middle with fishing line.  I wrapped the line around a few times, getting it tighter and tying knots in the fishing line to keep it tight.  The tighter around the middle, the more it looks like a sphere.  I had long leftover ends of fishing line hanging off the pom-poms, which is how I attached them to the braid.  I threaded a needle on the fishing line ends of each pom-pom and sewed up through the braid, and back down through the bottom of the pom-pom a couple times until I felt it was secure.

I was already done with the hat, so I had to unpick the bottoms of each ear flap, shove the braid in, and top-stitch the hole closed.  But had I planned ahead, I could have just sewn it in the seam when I attached the lining to the hat.

So it was done, and my little guy LOVES it.

Probably because he helped plan it himself, and made most of the choices as we went.  It was so fun to see him get so excited when it was finished.  I imagine when I have older kids I won't get such a great reaction as his when I make them things.

We finished the hat and he wore it while he and his dad played some video games.

Then it was bed time and at the last minute he crawled out of bed to get the hat so he could sleep in it.

 This morning he was still wearing it for breakfast.

And while he did some chores.

He thought it was funny when Woody wore it.

Then we took out the trash and he actually got to use the snow hat for what it was made for.

of course Woody came too.

It was quite an easy little project, it took me less than an hour, and was such a hit.  Especially considering these are $20+ from Gap, and I was able to just use scraps for everything.  And he loved picking out all the details himself.

Now I'm thinking of other girly fun hats you could make too.