Tale of Two Hats

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . ."

This is a little bit how I felt with the last outfit.  I was so excited to make a superhero outfit and I was trying out a new fabric and doing something fun for my kid.  I had thoroughly planned out the whole thing.

Super hero outfit:

• pants
• Blank slate pattern
• yellow twill
• grey and red accents
• shirt
• grey sport mesh
• polo style
• super boy embroidery
• hat
• baseball cap
• yellow twill
• grey lining

But, if you look at the list, this is not what I displayed on Monday.   The pants sewed up like a dream.  Then came the shirt.  The first thing that went wrong was that I was sewing away on my grey shirt and got in such a groove that I attached my facings and completed my placket when I realized, I had forgotten to attach the collar.  Oops, well I guess the shirt won't have a collar.

Next, I had the shirt hooped up on the embroidery machine and my 1 year old started messing with the buttons.  The embroidery was hopelessly ruined and thus, the grey shirt never came to be.

I grabbed the red fabric and decided I would just use that instead.  After all, red really would look great with my yellow pants that have red accents.  But this fabric did not like having a collar.  I had to fight and fight with it.  And at one point, my serger blade cut a small hole in the back near the neckline.  I would not let that deter me ... I already lost one shirt in this war and would not loose another.  So I patched that small hole and finished the shirt.

Then, I started on the hat.  I had lots of small pieces left over from the pants and decided to make two hats.  One for Eli and one for his friend.  I followed the pattern exactly and completed both in an evening.

The next morning, I brought them to church and gave them to the boys.  They were thrilled.  Until they put them on.  The pattern created a shallow style cap and for little boys, that really is not the best.  If they ran around and played, the cap would fly off.

So disappointing. 

That afternoon I had a friend scheduled to take pictures of my kids in their cute PRP outfits (I had completed two).  My pictures are so bad, I thought it would be nice for PRP to actually have some good pictures.  So, in the hour before my photographer arrived, I changed the hat pattern for a long skinny headed boy.  I think the cap looks a little silly, but it now fits him and he loves it.

In the end, it was a great project.  I learned how to handle some new types of fabric; I stretched my design and pattern alteration capabilities and finished a pretty cute outfit.  But it definitely had some "worst of times" moments.

"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."   This may be an exageration in my case.  But I count this as one of my cutest outfits and believe me, I took a rest when it was completed!