SHORTENING THE BRIM ON MY STRAW HAT

 I have had this hat for a couple of years now and only wore it once.  It just looks quite ridiculous on me for some reason.  I think the brim is too big.  I have it in our camper and just thought I should start wearing hats because, on this arthritis medication, I am not supposed to be in the sun.  That is kind of hard to do when you are camping!  We do a lot of hiking and going to the beaches, so I am in the sun everyday we are there.

I thought I would try to cut down the brim of the hat and make it smaller.  After looking closely, I do think I can cut it down without it falling apart and then just sewing another seam.  It is just turned under on the edge and sewn.

I cut off about an inch around the hat and now I will turn under about 1/2 inch to the inside of the hat and sew another edge.

Each row of the sewing stitches on the actual hat had a little lip on it, you can see it sticking out on the very edge.  This made for easy sewing and having a perfectly round seam.  I could not pin it as I sewed, I just had to flip the seam to the inside and hold it about an inch in front of my sewing foot and then sew.  The straw fiber was kind of stiff so I had to flip and sew and flip and sew slowly as I went around the hat.

It really didn't take long at all and it was all finished and looked better on me. Now when I first trimmed the hat it had a piece of thin hard plastic sewn into the edge of the hat which I removed before I trimmed it.  I didn't think I would need this but actually, I did.  When I put the hat on after sewing, the brim kind of flipped up and all you could really see was the inside of the brim instead of the outside.  So after I sewed the first round of stitching on the hat I did another round and I zig-zagged the round piece of plastic back onto the edge of the hat.  I don't know if you can see this in the picture below where I have sewn the plastic round hoop back on.  You can see the plastic laying on the black chair in the picture above.  This curved the edge of the hat down and fixed the problem!

 Here is my finished hat now and I like it much better, but we went camping and I forgot to take it with me!  Now that didn't do me much good, did it!  We have one more small trip planned, so I will be sure and take it next time.

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