1800s Ballcap From Craft Store Felt

I've always loved the look of vintage wool baseball caps-- in particular, the "floppy" ballcaps of the late 19th and early 20th century, which feature a shorter, not-too-stiff brim. Here's one you can make in just an afternoon, mostly out of hobby store craft felt! All files and instructions are included.

Five 12" square sheets of felt or wool (at least four of the same color) 

Basic sewing kit (bare minimum; a needle, a spool of dark thread, and a pair of fabric scissors)

Several sheets of any letter-sized paper

While not strictly necessary, it's fun to try to replicate a vintage hat as closely as possible. I found some archival records of a local baseball team that played around the turn of the century, the Santa Cruz Sand Crabs. It's hard to make out the exact design of their hats, but they seem to have stripes and a simplified version of the team logo on the uniforms' chests.

Most of the hat-making tutorials I've come across require disassembling an existing hat, both to salvage its brim and to repurpose its fabric panels into a template. As a lover of hats, I couldn't stand to cannibalize an existing hat, so instead I've drawn up my own template from scratch. These vintage-style caps have floppy brims, so there's also no need to salvage a stiffener from an existing ballcap!

You can print the template out, or you can gently trace it off of a laptop screen, which is what I did because I don't have printer access. Dimensions are also provided, so if you don't have a printer or a laptop, you should be able to draw these patterns by hand.

This is a self-explanatory step-- once you've traced your template onto the fabric you'll be using, take some scissors to it and cut out the panels and brim! I decided at the last minute that two layers of fabric might make for a better brim; this proved correct. If you're using craft store felt, I recommend doubling up on the brim.

Cut a thin strip from your fifth, yet-uncut sheet of felt, about the length of the leading edge of one of the front panels. Sew it along that panel's edge, leaving half of the strip hanging off the front panel, as shown in the first image above.

Next, sew a middle panel's edge onto the outside of the overhanging strip, taking care to keep it aligned with the edge of the front panel. Once you've done this, you should have something like the second image above-- plus a pretty good idea of where this is going. Repeat the process until you've used all the panels, and you're left with a closed, bill-less, and hopefully (at this point) either perfectly-fitting or slightly too large hat.

NOTE: Once all the panels have been sewn together but BEFORE you sew the hat shut, do a rough "size check". If the hat seems likely to be too small, cut a narrow, symmetrical seventh panel, and sew this on to the assembly. If the hat seems likely to be significantly too big, do the inverse, cutting narrow strips off the back two panels. When the hat seems likely to be only slightly too big, make no changes, and move on to the next step.

Disclaimer: I'm a very novice sewer (as evidenced by my sailing knots and sloppy stitches).

I found that the hat as-sewn was a little loose on my head. To solve this, I folded about an inch around the base of the hat inward, and applied twelve evenly spaced x-stitches around the circumference of the hat to hold this fold in place (the first six are shown above). This proved sufficient to provide a snug yet extremely comfortable fit.

This is the reason I'm making some changes to my pattern before uploading it-- my panels don't quite meet up in the middle! So instead of using a felt-covered button to close off the top of the hat, I cut a felt circle wide enough to close the light gaps, placed it on the inside of the hat, and carefully stitched the upper corners of my panels to this circle. With a better template, this would not be necessary; I will remove or modify this step when I update step 2.

Because I chose to double-up my brim fabric, I first sewed the identical top and bottom brim layers together. This created a brim-length stitch pattern satisfyingly similar to the ones seen on modern ballcaps.

Then, lining up the rectangular edges of the sewn brim to the outer corners of the two front panels, I carefully sewed the brim to the cap. This is where my choice of material (craft felt) again came in handy; it might have been tricky to push my only sewing needle through four layers of wool, but it moves through craft felt like butter.

Fire up the vector image editing software of your choice, whip up a simple design, mirror it, make it into a paper template, cut, then sew your hat's aesthetic centerpiece into place!

Remember I was trying to replicate a Santa Cruz Sand Crabs cap. The logo on their caps appears to be a simplified version of the one on their chests; I took some artistic liberties, simplifying it even further so that it more closely resembles a baseball, as well as the dual-acronym nesting letters "S.C." (Santa Cruz / Sand Crabs).

This hat is insanely fun to wear. It looks original without standing out too much, fits snugly on my head, and (of course) does a fine job of keeping the sun out of my eyes. It cuts a profile startlingly similar to the ones I recognize from photos of old ballplayers, and gives me an excuse to talk about a little-known piece of local history!