Hat Fixing Tutorial

      Since the beginning of my doll making I have bought cowboy hats from ebay. They are so much easier than trying to make a hat (I can't make a cowboy hat. Just throwing that out there). They fit fairly well on the Breyer dolls and have always been a bit too large for the Yvonne-type dolls. The white hat is the smaller hat, which is too large, but a better fit than the black hat. The black hat is even larger and always looks way too big. This was something that has been bothering me for a while, but something that I just had to deal with. 

       And then, out of the blue I had a brainstorm. Fix it. I don't know why it didn't occur to me to fix the hats before now, but it didn't. Maybe someone else has already thought of this. And maybe not. But what I did was take an exacto knife and start cutting the crown off the brim. Once I could get some scissors in I used those. 

      I made sure to cut it in a way that there was a bit of the crown left on the brim. I felt this would be a good surface for the gluing. 

     I then trimmed the crown shorter. I also trimmed the brim smaller. It can be tricky and also easily messed up. Take your time. You can always take more off but you can't put it back on. 

      Next I glued the crown back onto the brim. It was not perfectly cut on both pieces, which is nearly impossible, but I knew that it wasn't likely to be perfect. 

Here is a comparison of the original hat and a trimmed hat.

     The last step was to add a hatband to cover the join. This adds more stability and also covers any parts that didn't align perfectly when you glued the pieces back together. 

And here is the finished hat on a doll. No longer clownishly oversized!

      I hope you enjoyed this simple tutorial on how to take a craft hat from eBay (or anywhere else) and adjust it to fit a bit better on an Yvonne-type doll. It is still not perfect but it is so much better!