RSS feed
How to: Make a Star Trek Guinan Hat
Only 4 days until Super Star Trek Sunday on February 1st. In preparation for the costume contest, I’ve been assembling costume parts for my family and myself. After much debate, I’ve decided to dress up as one of my favorite Star Trek characters: Guinan.
Since I was drawn to the purple/eggplant outfits of Guinan’s, I’ll be wearing all dark purple. While many Star costumes can be purchased online, I was not able to find any parts of Guinan’s outfit. Using this photograph of her hat, I made one for myself. Here I am wearing my costume:
How to make a Guinan Hat:
- Materials: 1 yard of your favorite fabric. I found a funky purple pattern on the discount rack for $1.50 per yard.
- 1 large circle. I used a purple “door” from my kids’ Playhut Pop-up Ball Pit Play Tent (a really long lasting toy, BTW, as we’ve had ours for over 8 years and it still looks like new), but I also considered a large cardboard circle (I almost went with this) or a pie tin (it wasn’t quite big enough, but an aluminum platter would have been).
- Thread for sewing
- elastic - whatever you have on hand - I used a really thin one, but a wide kind would have been nicer
- bias tape (not necessary, but it made it look really nice)
- batting
- Leaving a large amount of fabric around the edge, sew a large section of the material around most of the circle, leaving space to put batting in the top of the hat.
- Put as much batting into the hat as you like.
- Finish sewing the entire perimeter of the circle.
- Flip it and sew an entire circle again on the opposite side of the circle (making piping around the edge).
- To fancy it up, sew bias tape around the entire edge (straight line) and then sew a satin stitch on top of that.
- Cut the fabric around the edge to approximately the place you’ll want the hat band.
- Using measurements from your actual head, create a band of the same size — cut a piece off the end of the fabric and tack the elastic into it in at least 3 spots.
- Sew it to the rest of the hat using pins to keep it in place. I could have inserted a stiff material (felt or interfacing) or wire ribbon if I wanted this part to be more stiff. HINT: put your sewing machine on the edge of your table so that you can turn the hat easily since the stiff circle makes that quite challenging.
- Trim, wear, and enjoy.
Total time: About an hour. Total cost: Maybe $4. Total fun: LOADS!
Related Articles:
- REVIEW: Star Trek: The Exhibition
- Star Trek Inspired Food
- Guinan and Lal
- The end of our Star Trek Journey… or just the beginning
- Super Star Trek Sunday Photos 2010
