The Story of the Hat

I would like to tell you about my journey. It is a story filled with pathos. With drama. With fleece.

As you may know, I live in Duluth. Duluth, historically, is cold. Surprisingly, this does not stop people from procreating. Thus, I also have children. I would like to reiterate these points for any retailers in the audience.

1. I live in Duluth.

2. Duluth is cold.

3. I have children.

I feel that it is important to highlight this issue, as said retailers apparently have one shipping schedule for the entire continental United States. For outerwear. For babies. I personally feel this is wrong, wrong, wrong-in so many ways- Wrong.

I believe that my child, while admittedly furry, is not entirely capable of regulating her body temperature and may not enjoy being taken outside in a sleeveless onesie. If we were in Houston, maybe. (Please, refer back to Item #1.)

Thus, when I tragically lost the hand-me-down green fleece hat that had served us so well for Thing One and again for Thing Two in August to September (Item #2), I found myself in the market for another one. You can probably guess the next chapter.

There were no fleece baby hats. Anywhere.

Now, I am nothing if not resourceful and obstinate. I refuse to wrap my child's delicate, squishy head in a diaper. (Again.) Therefore, I made my way to the fabric store where I found a sale on fleece remnants. After much digging in pattern books, I had found a pattern for a cloth owl, many pages of dog coats and one, lonely pattern for infant fleece hats.

Sold! I snatched up that pattern, waved goodbye to the crafty owl and took my kid home. As Ellie had already outgrown a number of her hats, I figured that she would have outgrown the Extra-Small size and I proceeded to cut out and sew a size Small. Girl's got kind of a big head is what I'm saying. (It's like Sputnik- round but quite pointy in parts.)

So I made this wild hat, because if you can't wear insane combinations of colors and prints when you're a baby, when can you?

OK, so it was a little big. It'll keep her head warm, right? I grabbed her and took her to Nora's swim lesson. When I got there, I discovered that the hat had devoured my baby's head and was working its way down her chest. She was delighted by this, but I felt like maybe a whole-head fleece helmet was less than ideal.

When I showed the hat to Nora, though, she wanted one in the worst way, which gave me an idea.

As you can tell by her pajama/zebra hat combination, Nora has her own sense of style. This hat fits snuggly into her aesthetic. So, problem solved. The hat wasn't a waste of time. Hooray!

But, wait. My baby still didn't have a warm noggin. And Nora thought that it would be super-neat if she and her sister had matching hats for Ellie's first day of daycare. But it turned out that infant hat pattern only goes down to 18.5 inches head circumference. For reference, my (totally-not-a-pin)head is 21 inches.

Probably belatedly, I measured Ellie's head. It was 16.5 inches. In other words, not Sputnik. Not an orange on a toothpick. Not a gargantuan cranium. Yes, I was wrong. And patternless.

So, now I had a baby with a normal-sized, cold head, a pre-schooler who desperately wanted to demonstrate her sisterly bond and a pile of fleece. At this point, I was thinking about wrapping the fleece around Ellie's head, diaper-style. (Again.) Only Nora's enthusiasm prevented that end to this story.

So, I made up a pattern. I made it match as much as I could to the one Nora was wearing. It turned out well enough to keep one baby head warm. And now, she's wearing it inside, because she gets crabby if you take it off.

Someday, these pictures are going to come back and bite me. I'm picturing two sets of zebra-hat-related therapy bills. Whatevs. It's totally worth it.