Bucket hats

As we're preparing for our next vacation (woohoo :-)) I noticed that I haven't shown you something I made for the boys last summer. Maybe you remember my preparations for that road trip? Well, it didn't go as smoothly as we'd hoped. Our kids just don't like car rides. Full stop. Maybe I'll just sew a heavy curtain to separate the back of the car so the boys can do all their whining and screaming and breaking toys and arguing with each other while we enjoy some peace and quiet in our front seats? Just kidding. This time around, we'll find out if they like flying better than car rides.

The holiday was lovely, though. We stayed at a wonderful cottage with a garden. There were other kids to play with and lots of toys. That gave us a little break from time to time. It wasn't far from the beach, and the weather was fine. So I got the pictures I was hoping for :-) And here they are (drum roll please):

What a fun day at the beach!

The pattern for these bucket hats
came from Liesl Gibson's wonderful book oliver + s little things to sew. Actually, this pattern was the reason I bought the book in the first place. And then I found out that the bucket hat pattern is available for free as an excerpt from the book. Ha! But I still kept the book, as the other items are really cute as well (although many of the patterns are for girls, as usual). I'm considering adding those cute-as-a-button penguin backpacks to my to-do list.

When reading through the instructions, I was at first a little scared, because there is quite an amount of hand sewing to be done to finish the hats. You'll have to stitch all around the inner circumference of the hat to join the two sides. So - believe it or not - this project turned out to be the one that got me hooked on hand sewing! Have a look at the finish, isn't it very professional? Imagine me patting myself on the back for this ;-))

And finally: how cute is that fabric??? 

It's Ribbit Beach by Alexander Henry. Of course, like nearly all of the other wonderful fabrics I use in my projects, I found it at my all-time favorite fabric shop, jochalu und ellle (nope, this is not an affiliate link in any way, I'd just like to send some greetings over to Heike ;-))