Making Hats For Doll Club

I've spent my morning with glue gun in hand, cutting ribbons and gluing like crazy for next week's doll club meeting at The Peanut's school.

Each month we meet, the girls share something about their dolls, and we make a little craft with them and have snacks.  For April, we decided an "Easter Bonnet" would be lovely -- and very fun for the girls to make.

But to get things staged to the point where the girls can take over?  It's taking a bit of work on my end.

I bought some mini-doll straw hats in the 6-inch size at a local craft store.  Found them in the doll aisle -- they were the largest size they had, and the crown just fits on The Peanut's American Girl doll perfectly.


Originally, I had planned to sew the ribbon around the hat, but that proved to be incredibly tedious and time-consuming, to the point that I just threw up my hands in disgust after finishing the first one.   Trying to make even, tidy stitches on a hat this small was not such a fun thing to do.  Trust me.

Mercifully, my glue gun worked out much, much better as a ribbon adhesive.  I used a mini-glue gun with a low heat setting so I wouldn't melt anything on the hat, and it worked perfectly.

Just be sure to be patient and work only a couple of inches at a time.  For each section, I put a string of melted glue around the brim, and then gently pressed the ribbon around to form a full circle all the way around the hat.  I cut each ribbon at about a 12-inch length, and then trimmed at the very end leaving a little more ribbon on the very end for an overlapping edge as I put a glue bead at the end of the already-glued ribbon to firmly adhere the edges to each other.

With a couple of the ribbons, I was worried about them unraveling because of the type of fabric, so I put a thin glue bead over the top as well to keep the edge firmer.

Then I cut two additional lengths of thinner ribbon at about 11 inches or so, tied a small, clear pony bead to one end, and pulled it through the hat to make ties on either side.

On the hat above, I had some extra ribbon leftover in the matching fabric, so I made a loop and glued it to the trim, then glued a small silk flower rose over the top to finish the look.

Voila!

That's just a sample for the girls, though, who will get to decide how they want flowers, bows and such to be added to their hats when we have the doll club meeting.  They'll get a hat with a ring of ribbon, and we'll individually attach the rest at the meeting.

I found the tiny silk flowers in the bridal area.  They are the tiny roses that you use to tie onto favors and they easily separate into single flowers to glue onto individual hats.  

Thought this idea was easy and very cute, and that other folks might have fun with it as well.  Enjoy!

I'll get some better pictures of the hats later -- am in the middle of finishing ribbon cutting for the bonnet strings at the moment, so I snapped the above quickly with my iMAC photobooth feature for you.