New Pattern: Low Waste Bucket Hat and Sunhat

Hello All,

I have a new-ish pattern to present to you.

The low-waste sunhat, which was available at the Making Zen Online Retreat last month, has had a mini makeover and is now a pdf pattern. It has a bucket hat brim option, a re-edited sew-a-long video, and a little tweak to the instructions for a superior finish.

It’s in my shop now; please enjoy 25% off for the next month.

The hat has an unusual construction, a self-lined crown, interior ribbon and topstitched brim. It comes in five sizes, to fit a 54cm/21¼” – 62cm/24½” head.

It works well for striped fabrics where the stripes are random-ish and don’t particularly have to match, like the blue and white hat shown. It also works fine for one-way prints.

The bucket hat uses the same crown as the sunhat, with a different brim pattern. I feel it has a vague “Sean Connery playing Indiana Jones’s father” vibe.

The pattern has less than 5% waste, so if (like me) you spent your children’s inheritance on half a metre of Marimekko Unikko print, it’s very satisfying to have only slivers of fabric as scrap. With this pattern, the larger the hat size, the smaller the percent of fabric waste.

As a comparison, the popular free bucket hat pattern (shown below) on this website has 35% waste.

(Therefore, if you were making this hat in a factory, for every 10 rolls of fabric you bought, you’d be throwing away 3.5 of them into landfill. Sure, you’d no doubt get a little less waste if you’re cutting volumes, but even 30% waste happens in factories depending on the garment.)

The pattern pieces are very unusual looking, and possibly the craziest shapes I’ve done with zero waste. The crown (below, right) is one piece and interlocks with its own lining. The brim pieces (at left) are cut separately from the crown. There are quite a number of brim pieces, but don’t be put off!

Here’s the requirements list:

I have two more low/zero waste hat patterns coming soon and I look forward to showing them to you. Our house is currently awash with hat samples 🙂

Cheers! Liz x