Really, I wanted an excuse to make said newborn a viking hat after seeing a very cute, but very expensive (something like $30 for a fleece baby hat!) at a toy store in Mendocino, CA. What better excuse than Halloween? I starting Googling baby viking hat patterns when we got home from our trip, and mostly found ones for knitting. I just didn't want to commit that much time.
Then I found this awesome and adorable hat pattern from Fleece is Fun. We all know how I feel about fleece, but my inspiration hat was made from fleece, so this Halloween Hat Pack pattern is perfect. Also, fleece projects are so easy and fast, I may have been won over. We'll see.
Lemme start by saying, my first kid has a giant head. My second kid ended up with a tiny head? According to the delivery doctor anyway. And compared with his older brother, I guessed she was right. It was the first thing the doc said when he was crowning (#TMIalert): "he has a really small head!" He was born September 20th, so by Halloween he still had small head status. But when I chose the smallest size baby hat from this pack and used the suggested .5" seam allowance, my husband made me start to worry that the hat was turning out too small. I tried it on the baby and it fit, but barely. A word of advice about this pattern: a supposedly small-headed 1-and-a-half month old came close to not fitting into the smallest size!
I moved the horns higher on the head than in the pattern, but they were hard for him to balance, so I recommend leaving them as-is in the pattern. I added a silver band at the bottom to make it look a little more viking and a little less buffalo.
Other than that, I love this free little pattern and highly recommend it. There are now two other hat packs on the site and they fit all the way up to adult size. They'd make adorable Christmas gifts!
Meanwhile, with a new baby, I just didn't have the energy to sew an entire costume for my older son. He loves the Johnny Depp movie Rango, so we DIYed a Sheriff Rango costume. We had the suede cowboy vest and hat, I bought him a red and white Hawaiian shirt from the thrift store, and he already had a green dino hoodie to wear under it. The only thing I had to make was the green tail, and I decided to make the mask last minute on Halloween since I had so much of that green felt lying around in my stash anyway (you may recognize it from my last year's Kermit the Frog Fascinator I made for Halloween).
