I’m counting this as a #memademay post since I made the hat and I’m wearing it! And it’s the last day of May!

Over a year ago I started making these bucket hats. Introduced them to the “Sew Cool Workshop” and several of the women made them, too.

These are two of the dozens that were put together in the workshop.

Thought I’d share that pattern here today. I found the pattern in a Art Gallery Lookbook. Art Gallery is one of my favorite fabric lines and whenever they introduce a new design, Art Gallery creates a lookbook with the fabric used in different projects. I like checking out their “Lookbooks” Some of those patterns are free. And that’s where I found this bucket hat pattern. This pattern was in the “Little Forester Fusion Fabric Lookbook”. It’s probably not out there anymore but I do have the link to the free pattern: Sandcastle Bucket Hat. (But, links do go away, so if this doesn’t work by the time you want to make this hat, there are SO MANY free bucket hat patterns on Pinterest, that I’m sure you can find one that is similar.)

Printing out the pattern is a little tricky. The designer uses “layers” in her PDF. If you are not familiar with “layers”, you might have trouble. I use Adobe Acrobat Pro to view PDFs and if I look to the side bar on the left, there is an icon that looks like a stack of paper. It should be the last icon. Just click on that and all the sizes show up. Then you click on the “eyeball” for the sizes you DON’T want. I think this is common when downloading patterns. I just downloaded one for a tunic and it was also a PDF with layers.

Here are the four hats I made.

The first two hats I made were mediums and they were too big. I switched to small after that.

Here’s the third hat.

I’ve played around with the interfacing. It really depends on the fabric used. With my first hat, I didn’t interface it at all. It’s floooooppy. The second one I interfaced the brim. Much better. The third I did the entire exterior fabric. On my last bucket hat, I just interfaced the brim which was perfect. I used upholstery fabric that I had saved from an old cushion. Repurposed fabric! And it’s my favorite version.

I also added grommets and a 47″ cord to the final two hats. I wear all four of them ALOT! On the boat, traveling with the top down, working in the yard. They keep my face covered and out of the Florida sun.

Perfect!