Imperial Officer – Hat

Cutting the pattern

So in my not so humble opinion, the hat really makes the uniform. If the hat is wrong, the whole thing is wrong. I did my first run of the hat last night and learned a few things:

-Resizing your own patterns is not always fun.
-My definition of perfection is not the same after two hours of working on something, and I should walk away and take more breaks.
-Measure twice and cut once isn’t just a cute idiom; it’s something to live by

The first pattern run of the hat really did come out alright, but I’m going to tweak it in two ways:

-I don’t think the top is oval enough
-The brim isn’t right. The ends should be in line with the rear hat flap and form a nice line, but mine doesn’t go back enough.

Fitting the pattern

The instructions speak of the paper pattern fitting ‘not too tight and not too loose’ – subjective, but that’s sort of hard to quantify. The fit of my paper pattern was not at all tight, and was loose but not so loose that it felt silly, if that makes sense. I also have a lot of hair, so I had to take account for that in the final product – right now my hair is straight and thus not quite as thick – it’s not always like that! After having tweaked the pattern enough so that I was satisfied it would make a fine hat, and finding myself satisfied with the fit, I got to work! My best tip would be to make sure the pattern pieces are smooth and symmetrical prior to cutting.

Cutting & Interfacing

So this followed for me pretty true to the instructions. I added 5/8″ seam allowance as recommended by the instructions for if you weren’t comfortable or if it was the first time you’ve done this. I think it was too much, even with first time mistakes. I’d only do 3/8″ unless you’re not experienced in sewing at all.

The only thing I would do differently is the heavy interfacing – I made mine a little too small in the final product. My recommendation is to cut this the size of the pattern piece rather than smaller, at least at first, and then trim. Some of this does have to do however with the fact that I did the overly large seam allowance, so keep that in mind here as well.

Sewing – Round 1

First, in sewing the visor I initially misunderstood – the ‘long edge’ that should be bsated is the rounded visor edge, and not the top of the smile, as it were.

For all basted edges I used my 6.0 setting (longest) for stitch length, and for all regular stitching I used 3.0, which is exactly middle of the road for that machine.

For the visor topstitching, I looked up my trusty Star Wars Ultimate Visual Dictionary and counted how many rows the real hat had, which was 6. The instructions note to do the stitching every 1.4″ inches, but I found that only gave me 5 rows. I did the stitching every 3/8″ instead, and was able to fit all 6 rows with a very similar look.

I didn’t use my serger despite the recommendation in the instructions, mostly because I didn’t feel like rethreading it. I used a seam stitch instead, and found that it worked just fine.

Hat Assembly and Final Stitching

The rest of the assembly and pinning of the hat I followed the instructions pretty much to the letter. The only step that I left out was all of the topstitching recommendations for the top of the hat – I found that this particular topstitching was not in any of the reference photos I could find, so I left it out. Other than that it went as noted. Measuring and pinning is VERY important – I know that the tutorial emphasizes it, but I have to concur

With the final whipstitching, there’s in some points four layers of fabric (plus interfacing!). I’d actually survived up to this point in my life (and when I say survived, I mean with plenty of bloody fingers) without a thimble – if you’re going to do this, a thimble is key. I got a pack of three leather ones and had them all on. It was really the only way to get this done in any measurable amount of time without losing the tips of no less than two fingers.

The Greeblies were ordered from Elvis Trooper who has nice, inexpensive ones, as well as a higher quality option. Once arrived, it’ll get a hat tack on the back of it and be attached post haste!