my sun hat

Last Saturday Hubby's family had a picnic at El Dorado State Park.  I carefully dressed for the occasion: long pants, long sleeve shirt, straw hat in the big truck.   I had Sister Suzy and Hubby get our straw hats out of the truck. This is what my hat looked like when I pulled it out of the trunk of the car at his mother's.

What you can't see in this picture is that the brim is separated from the top of the hat about halfway around.  A little bit of duct tape wasn't going to fix it if I had had some.  Hubby offered one of his straw hats but the wind was blowing about 30 or 40 mph and neither one of them had a chin strap.

So my face got burnt, purple-red burnt.  Sunday my face was so swollen that my eyes were little slits.  My face hasn't been this burned since high school.  Fortunately I didn't blister.  Now I'm peeling, including my eyelids and my lips of all things.

Well I needed a new sun hat and quickly.  I went out on the web to see if I could find some sun hat patterns.  I found one really cool one but they wanted $15.00 for the pattern.  Sorry, I don't have that kind of money for patterns.  So my second choice was a hat tutorial from just-chic.blogspot.com.  This is my new sun hat.

I used the leg of an old pair of lightweight denim pants I hadn't thrown away yet.  I thought the watch pocket would be a nice touch so I add it to the side of the crown.

And for more whimsy I used a fabric called bubbles for the lining.  The brim of the hat isn't very stiff.  Several things could be done to stiffing it up.  One, would be to use a very firm or stiff interfacing in the brim.  Two, would be to add another piece of interfacing.  Three, is a piece of florist wire in the bias tape around the brim which will be what I'm going to do, if I decide I want a stiffer brim than I have. I want to wear the hat a time or two before I decide.  I did starch the brim and sew concentric circles on the brim like a Boonie hat, which helped a lot.  Something else to consider is to cut a couple of pieces of fusing and weld everything together.

Things the tutorial did not talk about but you might want to consider if you want to make a sun hat yourself is she didn't talk about seam allowances.  I would suggest 1/4-inch seam allowances, as it is easier to get everything to match up for sewing.  She also didn't mention depth of the side of the crown.  I found a three inch side deep enough to let the top of the crown rest on the top of my head. I will probably be adding buttonholes on the sides of the crown to run a ribbon through to tie the hat on my head, as it is windy here. Press the seam allowances at the brim to the brim side, clip the seams and top-stitch the seam allowance to the brim helps the brim to stand out.

The cherries and apricots are beginning to ripen so I may be away from the computer for a bit.

Have a good day!

Judy