September 15 is Make A Hat Day! Or not.

Did you know that today is Make A Hat Day?  Well it is!

In honor of Make A Hat Day and Autumn (which is hopefully almost here in the San Francisco Bay area where it has been between 80 and 106 degrees lately) I decided to break out the fall fabrics and make a hat.

After spending a little time at Joann's Fabrics perusing the pattern books (did you know that Burda has patterns for lederhosen in the men's section of their catalog?) I decided that Vogue 9044 "Patricia Underwood Hats" was the way to go-it has five nice style options, and I went with View A, in the upper right.

I decided to use some vintage Linton Tweed for my project- I have been dying to sew some of it up into something- I thought a hat would be the perfect small project to give it a whirl.

Things did not go as planned. 

Excuse the bad photo- it was both late and dark!

I am sorry Vogue patterns (you know I love you!), but this pattern is NOT graded well.  

Every size, from XS to L, is the same height- it gets wider as it gets bigger, but no taller. This means that my hat ended up being 5 inches from top to bottom (which, according to the photo should land just above my ears), while my head from the top to just above my ear is 7 inches. 

The photo above shows how short it is even before I stitched on the inner band that goes around the bottom- this is a half inch seam, so the final hat would have been even shorter. Does the nice lady in the pattern photo have a really tiny head?

Here is where it ended up.  :-(

P.S.- the pattern includes four other hats that may potentially be lovely and fit perfectly.