Sailor Hats for the Diamond Dolls in White Canvas
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I recently made a set of 6 sailor hats for the Denver Diamond Dolls, a vintage dance group that I have joined. The routine was All Aboard! so naturally we needed to look the part. The choreographer specified white and slightly smaller than average size so they would perch on the head.
Since sailor hats are fairly ubiquitous I went looking online for a diagram or pattern I could use as a starting point. There are plenty to choose from! For fabric, I checked my fabric stash to see if I had anything suitable and I had a scant yard of white cotton duck canvas which was perfect.
This was the very first project that I used my new (to me) Kenmore serger for. It rattles a bit and is quite alarming until you get used to it, but it works beautifully! It made it very easy to whip up half a dozen hats.
My first prototype was far larger than anticipated, so I scaled it down quite a bit. I also tried two different methods of assembling the crown. The first method, sewing each triangle to the next all the way around, resulted in uneven seams. The second method, sewing three triangles together, then another three triangles, and then sewing the two halves together down the middle, resulted in a much cleaner look.
To attach the brim, I treated it like a waistband, but with no separation or overlap. The brim was just a continuous loop. I machine sewed the seam on the inside of the hat, then flipped the brim over and topstitched the other side. I did it this way around so that the topstitched side would be concealed when the brim was turned up, giving a cleaner look to the seam which ends up (sort of) on the outside. I continued my topstitching in a continuous spiral on the brim to give that quintessential sailor hat look.
Since the choreography for this piece was quite energetic, these hats had to be securely fastened to our heads. I didn’t want to do elastic, since that often looks odd, and can shift with fast movement. I ended up putting a quarter-inch ribbon all the way around the inside of each hat, sewn at 1 inch intervals. This created small loops which could be pinned to the hair wherever necessary. This worked very well, and we didn’t have a single hat fall off during a performance!
