Fun Hats for Children
Kids love to dress up. Cowboys, pirates, fairies, kings, queens, firemen, nurses doctors -- you name it, kids can pretend it. Hats provide a significant accessory in completing almost any dress-up transformation. Consider creating with your children a hat for dress up, a birthday or just plain silliness. Special occasions such as weddings and church services also provide opportunities for sporting a spiffy, fun hat.
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Birthday Hats
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Traditional cone-shaped hats, secured with an under-chin elastic band, can be decorated for a personalized birthday look. Use stickers, felt, glitter glue and construction paper to create numbers representing the child's birthday age in a variety of shapes, colors and textures. Affix the numbers to the pre-made birthday hat, or create your own base hat out of construction paper rolled into a cone shape and stapled in place. Staple a string of elastic on either side of the hat for securing it under the child's chin. Alternately, decorate a crown-shaped birthday hat, either one acquired pre-made or one cut and stapled from construction paper. Other birthday hat decorations to consider include images of favorite toys or of birthday treats such as cake and ice cream.
Crafty Hats
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Create hats and caps out of simple materials such as envelopes and cardboard cereal boxes. By cutting out the corner of an envelope and attaching a piece of ribbon or string to either side, you can create a petite cap. Or by covering the outside of a cereal box with glued crepe paper and adding yarn for tying under the chin, you can make a tall, square hat. The AHC arts and crafts website (artistshelpingchildren.org) offers directions for these and other unusual do-it-yourself hat projects from everyday objects such as an empty cylindrical salt container or ice cream carton. Any of these crafty hat projects can be decorated with materials that add a dash of whimsy such as pom-poms, ribbon, stickers and glitter glue.
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Character Dress-Up Hats
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Secondhand stores or your own closet are prime sources for obtaining hats used for dress-up fun. An old fedora becomes a gangster's hat and a straw garden hat turns into a cowboy or cowgirl's hat. Cover a dowdy ladies' hat with feathers or fake flowers for a fanciful fairy hat. For dress-up as pirates, doctors and nurses, create hats out of construction paper or purchase inexpensive versions meant just for kids. An inexpensive top hat sized for a child's head can become a Thanksgiving Pilgrim hat, a Leprechaun hat for St. Patrick's Day or even the distinctively striped hat worn by the Cat in the Hat.
Spiffy Hats
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Special occasions requiring very dressy attire can be made all the more dressy and special with the addition of a hat. Easter bonnets are de rigueur for a little girl's outfit, so let her choose a store-bought one, or turn a child's simple straw hat into the fanciful Easter bonnet of her dreams by adding lace, ribbons, flowers and even small bunny and chick figures. If your child will be a wedding flower girl or ring bearer, add a coronet of flowers and ribbon streamers for the girls and consider a boy-sized top hat if the men of the wedding party will be wearing them.
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