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Kelvin being Kelvin, of course he had to come up with some really wacky idea to out-crazy everybody’s crazy hats at Ravi and Jess’s Crazy Hat Party. He wanted some sort of head sucker, so I thought he was going to make a Half-Life Head Crab hat or maybe a Metroid hat. It turns out he wanted to make a hat where a dog is chewing at his head. His initial sketch:

And with Kelvin being Kelvin, he had to make this thing at the very last second. Ignoring my advice to start the night before, we bought all the materials at JoAnn’s and got home around 2:30ish, with the party starting at 7PM. He was supposed to be done by 6:30PM, but he was half an hour off his target. Regardless, I’m impressed with what he came up with in that 3-4 hour period, considering he had no patterns and very little time to make mistakes. I still would have preferred he started earlier so we could iron out some of the details.

Materials:
1/2 yard of black 100% cotton fabric (a few square feet used)     $4.00
50″x60″ Northpoint supreme plush throw, light brown color (less than half used)      $9.99
Black buttons (2 out of 3 used)      $1.99
3 9″x12″ squares of felt (red, black, white)      $.60
12 oz. bag of PolyFil (very little used)     $2.59
Black thread
Scraps of tan suede from Andrew’s puppet material
Andrew’s glue gun and glue
Total cost: $19.17

I was really hesitant about him using a throw blanket for material instead of other fabric. You can’t predict how they will unravel. Sure enough, when he cut up the throw, fuzz got all over the living room. The material stayed intact tho, and Kelvin was right in that it was appropriate for a plush dog.

Kelvin made relatively little mistakes in making the hat. He started off making a small black inner cap to stick the dog to. This cap was made from scratch and his own made-up pattern, which I thought was unnecessary since buying simple caps is easy PLUS I have actual hat patterns. Obviously the rest of the dog was his own made-up-on-the-fly pattern, tho he did use an Afro-Ken doll as a reference for the body. I think there was some initial problem with the teeth, but he fixed that. The eyes were stuck on using twisty-ties. I helped make the ears :) I had to wear the hat with dog partially sewn on as he stuffed it.

Amazingly in the end, it did look like a rabid dog of ridiculous proportions was eating his head. It’s far from perfect tho. The lack of time caused there to be some holes in a few locations on the dog due to rushed stitching, and the teeth and blood could have been a lot better looking. There’s a bunch of uncut thread, and there’s brown fuzz all over the black cap from the throw material. Still, not bad for <4 hours with no pattern or instructions. We’ve affectionately named him “Chopper“.

Posted on Sunday, December 2nd, 2007 at 8:10 pm in Sewing and crafts