Dog Walking Clothes Part 1

Whenever I walk the dog in cold weather, I envision the perfect hat. It covers my forehead, while being high in the back. I like scarves and coat collars, but they have a tendency to push my hat up in back and down in front over my eyes. I hate that. In the perfect hat, I can lift my head up high to look at the sky and my hat never touches the back of my coat.

The perfect hat also covers my ears well, and withstands cold winds. One day I was browsing the catalogs and found simplicity 4801. It was perfect.


According to the outside of the pattern envelope, it comes in both youth and adult sizes, but I swear I could only find one set of pattern pieces inside the envelope and the instructions said nothing about other pieces, nor did it refer to youth or adult sizes. I made a muslin and decided it was definitely a youth size!

My kids kept calling me a pilgrim. I said they were jealous because they wished they were little and could get a World War One Flying Ace hat out of me. This is the perfect pattern for that!

I just sized it up myself. I increased the width of the top triangles to add an inch around, added an inch to the band, and lengthened the ear flaps.

I used black fleece, lined it, and included an inner layer of rip stop nylon. I added ties, too. It looked plain, so I made a tassel of fleece and attached it to the top.

In this picture it's tipped back a little because my photographer kept telling me that I looked like a dork. He'll still freeze to look cool. Not me. But, I'll only wear this to walk the dog. It's designed to withstand walking in cold, blowing winds whipping across open fields for half an hour. It's so warm, it's too warm for casual use. When I say it's warm, I mean really, really warm. And it meets all my persnickety desires.