Project 002 — Drafting a Bucket Hat
In this post, I'll show you how to draft a bucket hat sewing pattern to your custom measurements.
Hello my sewing mathy friends! Today, we're going to build on the last lesson—How to Draft a Flat Brim Sunhat—and draft our own custom bucket hat. Like last week, there are just three pattern pieces, the crown, the side and the brim. But this week, I thought we'd step it up a bit and make an oval shaped crown and an angled brim.
I'm a little disappointed that the math is not really friendly enough to use exact formulas for all of the drafting, especially for the brim. But ultimately, I think you can draft a successful pattern without being super exact. I’ll talk a little bit more about this at the end of the post. Let’s get started!
If you missed the previous posts in this series, check them out here.
For this bucket hat, we will use an oval for the crown, two rectangles for the sides and two curved segments for the brim. See the image above for an example of how the pattern pieces would look.
Today's lesson
Part 1: Collect information (Write down all the measurements, ease, seam allowance, etc.)
Part 2: Draft the Crown
Part 3: Draft the Side
Part 4: Draft the Brim
Part 5: Further thoughts on drafting the brim
Part 1 Collect Information
To make your own custom fit hat, you’ll want to gather a few measurements. Read this post for more info on measuring yourself for a hat.
I’ve assigned a representative letter to each number we’ll need. I’ll use these letters to write the drafting formulas. When drafting your hat, you’ll replace the letters with your own numbers.
A Head circumference
B Ease at crown This is personal choice. I recommend measuring the inside of a hat that you like the fit of and then subtract your head circumference to find the ease you like.
C Seam allowance Designer’s choice
D Side Height 3-4” is pretty standard. You can measure a RTW hat you like to help choose this number.
E Brim radius This is how far the finished brim will stick out from the head. For a traditional bucket hat, the brim is fairly small, around 2 to 3 inches.
Part 2 Draft the Crown
If you wish, you can use the circle that we drafted for the Flat Brim Sunhat. Or, you can turn it up a notch and draft an oval. I shared how to draft an oval both on paper and digitally in this post.
To draft the crown, start by drawing an oval with a Circumference equal to Head Circumference A + Ease at Crown B (this is your finished head circumference which I will also refer to as FCH). Then, to complete the pattern piece, add your seam allowance C to the oval.
If you don’t want to draft your own oval crown, you can download a pre-made pattern. I found free patterns available from Stitching Vulture and Melly Sews.
Part 3 Draft the Side
To draft the side pattern piece, we will use A Head Circumference, B Ease at Crown, C Seam Allowance and D Crown Depth. For this design, we’re using two rectangles to make the side so the width will be half of the FHC plus seam allowance. The length is equal to D Crown Depth, plus the seam allowance.
The formulas are:
Hat Side Width = (A + B)/2+ 2 * C
Hat Side Length = D + 2 * C
Part 4 Draft the Brim
Just like last week, the brim is our trickiest pattern piece to draft and there are a few ways to approach it. The brim pattern piece is a curve, essentially a slice from a cone or ring. We want the interior curve of the pattern piece to fit to the width of our Side pattern piece. The exterior curve needs to be bigger and angle away slightly from the side of the hat. How much it angles is personal preference.
In my research, I found a couple of ways to draft this pattern piece. But neither is mathematically exact. I thought about finding the ideal angle and trying to mathematically draft from there but yikes those formulas are not friendly. I love math, but we don’t need to be that hard on ourselves. (I talk a little more about this in Part 5, if you’re interested.)
The first approach to drafting the brim is to start with the circular ring that we made last week and then pinch out or remove wedges to create the angled shape.
The second approach is to start with a rectangle and slash and spread to make the ring segment. That’s what we’ll do in this lesson.
Step 1: To draft the brim, we will first draw a rectangle that has a width of (A+B)/2 and a length of E Brim Radius.
Step 2: Next, divide the rectangle widthwise into eighths. If you’re using paper, you can do this by folding the paper in half three times. Cut the pattern along each fold stopping short of the pattern edge.
Step 3: Tape the left most rectangle to another piece of paper. Rotate each rectangle piece to create a gap at the bottom that is 1/2”. If you are working digitally, this is about 11 degrees. Repeat for each rectangle piece.
Step 4: Trace the outer edge, drawing a smooth curve.
Step 5: Add the Seam Allowance C to the outer edge.
I recommend testing out your pattern using paper to get a sense of the shape and if you like it. You may want to adjust how much you rotate the pieces of the brim to create a bigger or smaller angle.
That’s it for drafting! If you want to delve bts into what I’ve been thinking about, researching and exploring with hat drafting, read part 5. If you enjoyed this tutorial, please share, re-stack or just give it a heart. I really appreciate all the support.
Part 5 Further thoughts on drafting the brim
If you know anything about me by now, it’s that I like to be really exact. But pattern making is not always exact and I have really found that to be (annoyingly) true with hats. My biggest concern when drafting these hats was the angle of the brim. I wanted to find a perfect formula for drafting the perfect angle for the brim.
So, as I do, I thought a lot about the shape of hats. In our last post, we drafted a flat brim, meaning that the brim connected to the sides at a 90 degree angle. For this Bucket Hat, I wanted a much steeper angle of about 155 degrees. This angle works because the brim is fairly narrow allowing our eyes to see beyond it. For our next hat, we’ll design a wide brim sunhat with a shallower angle of about 115 to 120 degrees.
Looking at these brims, they are essentially cones. I looked into mathematical formulas for cones and, oh my, they are complicated. It gets into trigonometry which I honestly enjoyed in high school but have not practiced since. So, alas, I decided to forego a formula and use a trial and error approach. Pattern making has a lot of trial and error.
To draft the bucket hat brim, I did a bunch of paper mockups and settled on doing 8 divisions and spacing them 1/2” apart because I thought it looked the best and was closest to my desired angle.
That said, depending on the Brim Width, using a 1/2” spacer in step 3 will create really different results. Using a unit of spacing is very common in hat drafting tutorials and I think it works well. However, drafting by rotating a certain degree is more uniform.
In the example above, I drafted 5 brims of varying radii from 2” to 3”. I divided each brim into 8 pieces. In the first example, I rotated each rectangle 10 degrees from the top left corner. You can see that each size of brim nests nicely inside the other and the interior and exterior curves are uniform.
In the second example, I rotated each rectangle so that the space at the bottom was 1/2”. Because the rectangles are different lengths, the angle of rotation is different. Thus, the smaller brim is more curved than the larger brim. Btw, the average angle of rotation was about 11 degrees for these 5 examples.
I think most people use the spacer method because they are using paper to draft. And that’s the more traditional method of drafting. However, if you are drafting in Illustrator, rotating by degree is actually easier than using the spacer method.
Ultimately, I think either method works fine and it’s interesting to see the different results. Both methods retain the same seam length for the interior curve, which is necessary for it to connect to the Side piece. I honestly don’t know how or if having a more or less curved pattern piece would affect the final outcome. That would be some experimenting for another day.
I hope you enjoyed this post! Next week, we’ll draft a wide brim sun hat with a shaped crown.
Happy mathing!
Beth
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