Last weekend I sifted through the stash looking for inspiration for incoming babies being born to people I know in the near future and was truly surprised by how much of my stash is comprised of scraps of questionable utility. They’re too small to make a garment but big enough that they might be useful someday somehow and not a one matches another. What I had didn’t inspire nursery items, but the scraps from the totes I made for the kids for Christmas caught my eye. Could I eke a couple bucket hats out of them? I could! Barely. MJ, poor thing, got really upset when she saw me cutting these out because she thought I had massacred her tote bag and yet the matching set doesn’t seem to make her heart swell as much as it does mine.

Bucket hats are the best. You get to use fun fabric and not too much of it. They’re useful. They’re unisex. Oliver + S’s pattern is perfect and free. They make great gifts. Not this time, though: I made these in size medium for my kids. The new babies get nothing for now, but don’t worry. There’s still time.

I used to sew a series of concentric circles on bucket hat brims, but I read somewhere to sew a spiral instead. BRILLIANT. Such a simple and elegant solution to a problem I didn’t know I had.
Four little scraps put to good use. Very little impact to the stash, but a bit of a relief to the overwhelmed psyche.