How cute is this sun hat? I actually made it a little over 2 years ago to bring on a little wedding anniversary get away to Newport, RI and meant to blog about it then, but never did for some reason! It was supposed to be one of my first blog posts, along with Lenny's vintage Mickey party, I guess it's better late than never! Especially when I recently posted this photo to Instagram and a lot of you were interested in seeing how I made it :)
It's actually pretty simple and all you need is:
A sun/straw hat
Pencil
Rounded chord type ribbon
Stencil (you can make your own if you have a Cricut or Silhouette or you can freehand it!)
Hot Glue
Optional Trim
So I made my stencil with my Cricut. I picked a pretty cursive font and cut it out on cardstock paper. I then removed the actual words from the paper and was left with the outline of the letters. If you don't have one of these cutting machines there are definitely some cursive font stencils on Amazon or if you have pretty neat writing you can totally freehand it! I have neat print, but I'm not fond of my cursive so I chose to use my machine.
So this is what it looks like with the letters weeded out of the DIY stencil and lined up on the hat. Next you want to take a pencil and lightly trace the letters. After everything is traced, have your hot glue gun and ribbon ready! A round chord type ribbon works best for this project, regular ribbon will not be able to be manipulated around the curves of the letters correctly. Plus you want a more 3D effect.
You can see the light penciling on the hat and how the ribbon works well on curves in this photo. Trace the markings with your hot glue gun little by little (if you are a DIY'er like me, you know hot glue can dry pretty quickly!). You want to keep the connected letters flowing through seemlessly so only cut the ribbon where a letter ends and there is a space between that letter and the next one.
Keep tracing the letters with the glue gun litte by little and placing the ribbon on top pressing down firmly until you get to the end. Cutting the ribbon only when there is a space between letters, like between the "M" and "r" in "Mrs." and the "o" and "f" in Cofield. After all the glue is dry you can go back and erase any pencil markings you can still see. Doesn't take too long at all and now you have a cute hat with whatever saying you want on it! I added a cute pompom trim on to my hat to give it more pizzaz!
You can even use this method to personalize other things like tote bags, make up bags, pencil cases, the options are endless! Hope you enjoyed this DIY, if you make a hat or use this method to personalize something else tag me on Insta!
XO,
