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Good morning pals! I recently made myself a hat and even if you’re not into this specific hat you can use this guide for other hat ideas you may have! If you have hat ideas! Or fabric painting/patch ideas in general I guess!
Okay so if you follow me elsewhere (which you probably do) you probably saw me get really weird about Gravity Falls this summer. Alex Hirsch/Disney released a new book (The Book of Bill) along with a lo-fi album and a website ARG and man, it just hit the spot. You know when something just hits the reward centre in your brain juuuuust right… it was so nice of them to make this whole world that has everything I like in it, specifically for me! Very, very thoughtful. Thank you Alex, you’re a real one.
Anyway, I don’t usually love official fan merch because it’s usually just like.. plastered with logos and characters and that’s just not the vibe I want. I like something subtle that passes for normal clothes, but that other fans recognize, so I decided to make myself a Dipper Pines hat! Gravity Falls has actually had some really kickass merch in the past but other than a recent drop that I didn’t even know about until like.. yesterday after everything was sold out, there hasn’t been any for years (and rightly so–the show came out in 2012 lol) so making it myself was the obvious choice.
I didn’t take as many pictures as I should have throughout this whole thing but I have enough that I thought I’d share how I made it.
So.. First off. Dipper has a teal-ish blue hat with a white front panel, graced with a pine tree in the same blue as the rest of the hat.
It’s more of a trucker hat shape, but I have a very small head so I went with a standard plain white ball cap that I picked up on sale at H&M (I didn’t like the quality of the cheap blank ones I found at Michael’s, etc.)
I originally was planning to learn how to sew a hat! But then I didn’t really feel like it in the end, so I spent a lot of time looking for blue ones with a white front panel. Unfortunately, it was SUPER hard to find one in the right kind of turquoise-blue and I didn’t like the royal blue options I found. Also, they were expensive. I found one that was somewhat suitable, but shipping alone was like $20 so I decided to go the fabric paint route.
Luckily, I had some Angelus leather paint that I bought for a shoe-painting project a while back and so I got some fabric medium and prayed for steady hands. You could FOR SURE do this with regular acrylic paint and some fabric medium, but since I already had the good stuff that I’m not using for anything right now, why buy something else?
Starting with the brim, I taped off the front panel, tucking the painter’s tape into the seam. I then went in with a small brush to tackle the tricky parts, and a larger brush for the easy bits.
I had to be VERY careful about touching the hat when the paint was wet as I didn’t want to leave any fingerprints on the white part, so I gave it a blast with a hair dryer and then used a mixing bowl covered in plastic cling wrap as a holder so I could paint the rest of the hat without touching it too much. After I was done painting, I let it dry enough to be able to handle it and then set the paint with a heat gun on low.
Pictured: I also taped some plastic wrap to the table to protect my workspace. Not necessary but definitely a good idea if you’re going to be putting it down at any point! Cardboard or something also works fine but the plastic wrap cleanup was SO quick and easy.
Now, my original plan was to make a pine tree patch with raw canvas edges and hope that it frayed nicely. I painted a piece of white canvas, cut out the tree shape with pinking shears, attached it to some interfacing, and glued it down with some press-on double-sided adhesive, which comes in small sheets and you can purchase at any fabric or craft store, probably.
It was not good for longevity hahaha. The adhesive stuck very nicely but the interfacing eventually started to peel, and the patch was too small to sew a running stitch along the edges to attach it properly so in addition to the interfacing problem, the fraying didn’t work well either. I’m very inexperienced with sewing, fun fact.
I considered learning how to use the embroidery machine at the library but it just seemed like a lot so I decided to pull out ye olde embroidery hoop, colour match some floss at the craft store, and hand-stitch the edges. I put another piece of white canvas in a hoop along with a piece of scrap cotton to serve as a backing to the patch, and painted the canvas. I drew a tree with pencil, then did a really rough backstitch in white thread as a guide.
Embroidery floss usually comes in threads of 6 strands that can be separated. Because I wanted it to be quick and easy but not bulky, I used three strands at a time and just did a satin stitch all the way around the edges. Poke the needle through on one side, over the guide to the other side, and then needle up again as close as possible to the original stitch. (Is this actually a “satin stitch?” I may never know.)
I found it was a lot easier to do this by flipping the hoop and looking where I was poking so I was always going through the “top” instead of trying to find the right spot by coming up through the bottom, but again, I’m pretty inexperienced other than some cross-stitching in my younger days and a tiny bit of beading in recent years so I’m out of practice.
To turn the corners, I used the same hole (or very close) on the inside of the corner and “wrapped” around the outside. This worked with varying success but overall I think it turned out really well. Especially from a distance. You can see where I started, and where I kinda got into the groove, hahaha.
I forgot to take pictures of the next part, but I put some superglue all along the back of the embroidery as insurance against a stray scissor cut, took it out of the hoop, and then EXTREMELY carefully, cut around the outside of the embroidery, leaving a tiny bit of fabric along the edge so as not to cut my stitches. There are other ways to do this that don’t leave fabric on the outside using transfer paper, but I didn’t have any and this suit my needs well enough that it didn’t matter.
I then traced and cut out another piece of double-sided adhesive from the press-on sheet and attached it. You can use the back of a spoon or something to really get it in the nooks and crannies.
Voila! DIPPER HAT!! I wore it walking down the street the other day and a girl passing in a car yelled “I LIKE YOUR HAT” out the window, so. It’s already paid dividends.
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