Miss Bridget's Birthday and Cloche

Miss Bridget is our, just turned 1 year old, neighbor. I feel like I have slighted her since I haven't made the hats for her that I had hoped.

Well, I finally have gotten a couple of "items" made for her.

First is the "outfit" I made for her 1st birthday. I had seen the dress (Crochet Tiered Dress) many times and loved it but, for some reason, I hadn't made it for my almost 4 year old niece. So now was the time.

The hat is based on a Russian pattern that has a diagram to follow 
which is good since I definitely don't read Russian. The brim of the hat wasn't wide enough. Miss Bridget's Mom likes wide brims to keep the sun out of her children's eyes when they are young. This resulted in my "just playing around" with the pattern until I came up with this design.

When I first saw the hat I thought it looked like the petals on a flower, yet there was no flower on the top. So, again, I modified. I placed a flower, to hide I thought if I used yellow for the start it would look like a flower, it didn't. Now it is hidden behind the new flower . . . I like it.

BUT, instead of the 18 inch circumference it ended up closer to 20 inches. (Yes, she will be able to wear this for YEARS! LOLOL) So I did my standby remedy, run some ribbon through the round between the hat and brim a  . . . VIOLÁ, hat that will fit a 12 month old and allow her to grow into a larger hat.  

Now this hat is still sitting on Grandma's dresser here in the living room.  Bridget's momma knows about it. 

I have seen SO MANY interesting patterns that resemble, or at least they look like it to me, flowers. I wondered if I could put them together in a pattern for a hat. That is h ow this pattern came about. About half way through I'm thinking, "Wouldn't this make a FANTASTIC Mandala." 

So I opened up a program so I could write the pattern out as I added, subtracted, reworked and frogged what I thought would work. Most of the times it worked smooth . . . let's know talk about the red tulips on the blue background. I think we will just keep how much of a pain in the ass it was to ourselves.

You can't really see it in this photo but the section right below the tulips in the lavender and shades of pink resembles, at least it resembles to me, pansies. It is a very open pattern that I just loved. 

But, again, when I got to this point the circumference of the hat was to large for Bridget. So I found a brim from another Russian pattern diagram that I heavily modified to pull the hat together to make it smaller. Again, it worked. 

Before I fastened off I took it over for Bridget to try on. Again, it actually fit. Her momma said it reminds her of of a Strawberry Shortcake doll's hat.

I brought it back home with me and started looking for the pattern I had used and, of course, I hadn't saved it with everything else. o I did what I thought it looked like and ended up with a large brim for momma. But, the brim was larger than I had planned. So another flower pattern was used to make a pin to hold part of the brim up if it flops into her eyes.

Now, I need to  get this hat across the street to Bridget and see if I can remake the pattern into a Mandala. Basically everything is written out except the brim. I think it will be pretty easy (I'm going to change the tulip section). If it works you will see it here. If it doesn't, whoops :)