a little belated, but that's okay.

Back in December, I was feeling a little overwhelmed with all the making that was going on. Between the big craft fair weekend, and all those freaking cookies, it was a little much. I was pretty happy that I had made about fifteen thousand jars of jam back in the summer, because everyone loves jam for the holidays!

I did make a few presents, and one of them was these two little hats for Jared's nephews. I had bought this super soft fleece to back some of my patchwork scarves and I thought it would be perfect for some easy peasy (and cute!) hats for the little ones. It was. Unfortunately, the hats were way too small. And the design I made up was way too wonky. What I originally did was take two flat pieces of the fleece (shaped in half circles essentially) and sew them together, with either the bear ears or the dinosaur spikes sandwiched in on the top. Then I added a contrasting band around the bottom with earflaps and ties. Unfortunately, this fleece is not very stretchy and using just two pieces was way too flat (on top of being just plain too small).

So I finally got around to re-doing these hats over the weekend. I realized that I needed to make the design a little more, um, three dimensional. So I copied a fleece hat that I have and made the top portion of the hat have four triangles that got sewn together to make it more round. The contrasting band with the earflaps and ties became a little bigger and the hats are way better. This was a super easy project that (once I got the pattern figured out) seriously took less than an hour per hat (maybe even less, I wasn't exactly timing myself). Since I don't have kids of my own, it's always really hard for me to gauge sizing for kids. After the first hats were too small, I had Jared's sister-in-law measure their heads, and it turns out that they're about the same size as mine (they are two and three and a half). This surprised me. The hats might be too big now, but I'd rather let them grow into them than make them again.

The best part about fleece is that you can leave the edges raw since it won't fray. Actually, after finishing the dinosaur one, I realized that I thought it came down too far, so I just trimmed the front a little, so sweet. I love the contrast of the yellow stitching against the light grey and charcoal here too. I also like that the bear ears and dino spikes make this very kid-like, but they're not too cutesy (the color choices probably have something to do with that too!) I didn't really make up pattern pieces for this (which I should so that I don't forget it), just some sketches and notes in my sketchbook. I've been wanting to post a tutorial or free pattern here, so I'd be more than happy to share this one here if anyone is interested.