I'm-azon Aviator Hat

I don't know what that title is about...

...but what I do know is that my Junji Ito has recently arrived and besides some horror shivers I've been left with a bit pf packaging material. And if you know me, you probably also know that there's no waste materials for me (almost).

But before venturing into depths of crafting endeavours let's take a brief dive into human history, where we can picture one of our distant ancestors encoutering a wild animal. Most likely their interaction wouls consist of the man enthusiastically poking the animal with a pointed stick having in mind consuming what that is inside of it as food and wearing what's outside - its hide - to protect himself from forces of nature.

Fortunately we live at other times, and feading our brain is more iportant task than feading our stomacks. That's why we have invented books. But we shouldn't discard the wisdom of ages, so let's consume the book but not forget to make best out of the packaging it came within to protect our precious heads from... insanity... I don't know. Let;s make a hat out of it.

So, firstly, we'd like to remove all those callosities indicating the long path our animal had made to finally bring itself into our hands.

May the hairdyer hhelp us with that.

Cut off the sides and the floppy thing to turn the package into single sheet.

There's a bunch of designs to aviator cap's, and after doing some search on the internet, you'll be able to find the pattern that suits you best.

You can also use this instructable by knopfling to build your own pattern from scratch.

Also I'm providing a PDF file with the pattern I've used, but it's not up to scale, so you'll have to resize it to fit your need. Maybe a couple of mockups will be needed to define the correct size.

So, get the pattern and print it to make templates. As you can see, I do "printing" in my own way

Cut the details into pateerns.

To transfer your patterns onto the material lay them on it first.

Doing that I tried to position them so that the existing packaging design would be incorporated in the resulting hat. I have added a strap piece to one side as well.

Trace the deatails, and cut them away.

The rest of the project will be sewing. But before starting make some testings on a scrap pieces of materials to set your sewing machine to deal with it.

It turned out that my modern machine wasn't quite able to sew this package consistantly so I had to revert to my grandma's old Singer. After some tweeking it was doing mostly great. The only thing is that at places the stitches were a bit too tight which resulted in minor tear-throughs. Using teflon foot might prevent this, but I didn't have any at hand.

Another preparation before sewing is to pop the bubbles alongside the edges of details to prevent them messing with the sewing, which is a thing. To do so I used that plastic roller.

And now it's the matter of sewing the details together: alonf the side first, and from the outside to secure the fold - next (I hope photos represent the idea clear enough).

Conect details to form both - left and right - sides first.

Then add a long stripes to create middle section. Notice that the wider side goest to the front.

Now, wit the template I've had I've got the detiles significantly shorter than required. I've fixed it in the template's PDF I've priveded, but for my project I had to sew on an additional pieces cut from cut-off scraps.

When you have two halves of the cap done, you can sew them together to form the full hat.

As you can see I've trimmed the excessive addition material from the previous step to match the curve on the back of tha cap.

To finish the edges simply fold about 5mm inside and sew them through to create the rim.

I used the barcode design as a decorative element oh the front of the cap.

I used a doublesided tape to secure it first, and then I've sewn it down. Be carefull not to apply the tape at places where the seam is going to be, since it'll gum up on the thread ad the needle making sewing nearly imposible.

The last thing I've added was a pair of loops on the side of the cap to fix the strap.

To make those I use strips I've cut from the side of tha package in step three.

And this is the finished cap. It turned out too small for me, even though I have not a big head, but given the size of the packaging I've got I wouldn't be able to make a bigger size anyway. It'll be fine for kids, though, and since my nephew is out of my reach currently I've used the bear as a model insted.

So, what this project was about? It's a combination of two things: me wanting to make an aviator hat for myself for a long time and my desire to play with and explore this packaging material as a crafring media. The way the paper and bubbly wrap is combined in it reminded me the furr inlaid leather the actual aviators caps are made of, so it brought me to an idea of making one out of Amazon packaging Ihad.

And, it was good at both: I've had a good practice at sewing the hat as well as I enjoyed working with the material. It present's something between paper and fabric and can be sewn into many shapes. I definitelly going to do some more experimentations with it in the future, since I've already have a couple of ideas. But this is it for now, thanks for your attention and this project wasn't sponsored by anyone.

And if you want to support, what I'm doing here on instructables, and liked this project in particular, take a look at my amazon Wish List and, maybe, provide me with a new book as well as new packaging to craft from. Or you can send me a gift card using my e-mail: altername@ukr.net.