A mini-tutorial on making doll straw hats…

Hi everyone,
It’s late and I need to hurry, but just a few minutes and I’ll get to bed… It’s already Monday for me… eek!

First… a REMINDER: The sweet little set I made for the My Meadows, 6″ Twinkles dolls, is ending tonight on Ebay! You can find “Waiting for Easter” on Ebay by clicking the picture at the right side bar or you can click HERE.

Next: I totally missed showing Joy’s Valentine Dolly dress! She emailed me the pictures and I was sure I had shown them, but I guess I was just remembering chatting with her after her email. Anyway, here is her sweetie showing off her! I forgot her name… sorry!

Hi Jeanne,
Here is the outfit I made for Valentine’s Day. If you look closely, she is making a heart with her hands.
The other shows Callie, (the neighbor’s cat) we call her, photo bombing.

Okay now for a quick tutorial with a few pictures on how I made Mae’s hat. This was a new hat mold for me and I didn’t realize HOW MANY TIMES I had to go round and round to get it finished. It was definitely my LONGEST time making a hat. I timed it and it took me 3 HOURS to make just this part of the hat… no embellishing yet… but there will be some later. I have to finish the dress set to see what colors to use for it.

Anyway, here are a few pictures and a few words about each one.

You have to use a hat mold or some kind of form to keep your hat in shape… this happened to be a hat mold from PNB… it was a new one for me and I was hoping it would fit Mae’s head well. It did.

You first put double stick tape down around the edge of the hat for the first row and then use dots of glue as you go round and round, just barely overlapping each row.

I’m guessing this hat took 20 yards of hat straw… I figured I had this much on the green hank I was using. As you go round and round your braid tends to get a curly and you have to kind of straighten it every couple of rounds.

When you get up to a curved area, you have to pull the threads along to top edge of the braid and it draws up the braid and goes around the curves. That’s what the little pieces of loopy threads are…where I had to pull it up to get it to curve.

It gets smaller and smaller the closer you get to the top center of the hat. If you are consistent in making the rows overlap each other pretty evenly, your center should be right on top…

Here is a picture of the whole hat so far…

You curl the top as much as you can and only leave a tiny hole that you will use to push this last bit of braid into and then glue in place on the inside.

I usually leave the hat to set for about 5 or 10 minutes, pressing all the rows with your fingers as one last effort to get the glue to hold in place. I used a tacky glue and it REALLY grabs and holds… I’ve never had a hat come apart.

Then it’s time to take it off the mold. You just start pulling it away from the double stick tape (which stays put on the mold) and work the hat off. It feels like you are going to rip the hat off as it sort of turns inside out…but then it just suddenly pops off…