In Spoonflower Spotlight, I highlight one of my Spoonflower fabric designs in a sewing or crafting project.

I have an unusually large head.  In commercial sized ballcaps, I commonly wear a men’s medium. One of the reasons I was drawn to knitting was the opportunity to make winter hats that actually fit over my head and covered my ears.  I also, like many people, have become concerned about my sun exposure and want to make sure I’m keeping the sun off my face as much as possible. (PSA to go get any moles regularly checked by a dermatologist!)  So last summer, when Spoonflower posted a free bucket hat pattern on their blog, I really wanted to make one – but I also suspected I’d need to make it larger.

To test this theory I printed out the pattern pieces Spoonflower provided and pinned them together to essentially make a paper muslin. Sure enough there was no way the original pattern was going to fit.  So I made some notations on where the shortfalls seemed to occur, and then drew some larger pieces on tissue paper (major shout out to the historical sewist community on You Tube – I only had the idea of how to do this because I’d watched so many of them need to alter a vintage pattern to fit them correctly).

Once I had a mock up that fit, I carefully unpinned the hat and used the new larger pieces as the pattern. To make the hat, which is reversible by design, I chose some black tweedy cotton I had from an older sewing project, as well as a fat quarter of my Herringbone Patchwork-High Contrast fabric in Lightweight Cotton Twill, which is my all time best seller in the WLS Makes Stuff Spoonflower shop.

I largely followed the instructions on the blog post from there, with one exception.  The tweedy cotton I was using is a little lighter and frayed far more easily than the cotton twill, so unlike the blog post, which gives you the option to leave the edges unfinished, I had no choice but to bind the edges.  I ended up doing this by hand because I was worried my machine wouldn’t be able to get through two layers of fabric, both sides of the binding, and the interfacing that was sandwiched in the middle.  But once this was done, I had a great, and for once, roomy, bucket hat.  This was also a great practice project for learning how to work with interfacing, which I’d only used once before in a very limited context.

I’ve now had the hat for about a year and I wear it constantly.  I am considering putting an eyelet or a small loop of bias binding on the crown of the hat to allow me to bobby pin it to my head on really windy days (a consequence of a looser fitting hat I had not really experienced before), but it offers great sun protection and doesn’t make my head too sweaty. I also like that because the fabrics are slightly different weights, with the Herringbone out side the brim has a little more droop, while with the tweedy cotton it has a little more structure, so I can adjust it to the level of coverage I need.

Fat Quarter projects like this are great for Spoonflower fabrics because Spoonflower often has really good sales on Fat Quarters (I often just grab several fat quarters during these sales so I have them on hand when inspiration strikes.)  

Would you ever sew your own bucket hat?