By Tawni Rogers
Like I would guess many people who craft regularly, I got asked by my family to make my niece a special hat for her Halloween costume. I think a lot of us are approached to make special items or things that are harder to find in the store, and of course, it's very hard to say no.
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I have the personality where I will say yes first and then figure it out later. And that is very much what this story is about.
A Ravelry Pattern and a Niece's Halloween Costume
Pattern: ravelry.com
My niece needed a very special large pink bunny ear hat for her Halloween costume this year. Very similar to a cartoon, I'm sure you've all seen. And I jumped at the chance to be able to figure this out for her.
Of course, it looked easy on the outside. It's a very simple hat, all one color, no color changes. The stitches are the same.
You work it around for a little bit, and I thought it was going to be super duper easy.
I was able to find a very detailed and well-written pattern on Ravelry and thought I'd be golden.
Easy Crochet Until the Ears Wouldn't Stand
And much like I thought, the actual crafting of it and crocheting of it was fairly simple. It was all one color, and the stitches were very simple. I only had to sew on two pieces, and it came together very, very quickly.
However, come time to finish it up, I learned the hard way that these ears were not going to stand straight up and down as easily as I imagined they would.
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Cardboard, Polyfill, and Wire Across the Hat Four Times
I tried everything. I've made a lot of amigurumi animals in the past. I've made ears and tails.
I've been able to sew them on to make them stand. I've used polyfill stuffing. I even tried cardboard in these ears.
I thought if I slid a piece of stiff cardboard in there and sewed it on super tight, the ears would stand up like I wanted them to. And they just were not going to.
Luckily, I was able to troubleshoot with fellow crafters, people in Facebook groups, a couple of friends of mine, and I figured out a way to run wire all the way up and down the ears, and then towards the front and back of the hat at the base of the ears. Even that was not enough to hold the ears in place to be worn the way I wanted to.
Then what I did was run wire across from ear to ear in the hat, like a headband, four times. Then I took long scraps of yarn that I just crocheted into patches almost really quick and sewed those on top of the wires so that they wouldn't scratch anybody, so that they would hold the wires as tight as they could, and it was a lot of work.
Discouraged, Then Proud of Those Straight Ears
I'll be honest, I was very discouraged for a good portion of this project. I thought the crocheting of it was super easy to start with, and I was way ahead of schedule. Of course, I'm trying to get this done for Halloween, and I thought to myself, I overcommitted; I'm not going to be able to get this to look like they want it to look.
She's not going to have the hat she needs by the time she needs it. And I just was not able to figure it out.
After playing around with the wire for a couple of hours, trying the headband option, getting them sewn in super, super straight and super, super tight, I was finally able to succeed, and the ears stand straight up and down. I'm very pleased with the result. You can bend them any way you'd like.
You can bend the wire around your head as you put the hat on to kind of hold it on tighter. It's not something that I'm going to be doing again anytime soon, but I was also pretty darn proud of myself for solving the problem this time.
