Valentine’s Day is not one of my favorite holidays. I think that you should show your love all year long and I grow very tired of having to see all the fake love floating around. However, what I do love about the holiday is that I get to attend St. Valen-Chi which is an annual pawty for Chihuahuas run by Ada Nieves, pet fashionista.
Now you can’t attend a pawty without proper attire. For Mimi, she had her pink dress and bows for her hair and Eli had his tuxedo…..but I felt it was missing something. Yes! He needed a top hat. I turned to my friend Google and found several sites with instructions on how to make your own top hat. All the sites seemed to have similar templates and you can probably find a better template than the one I used.
I am not crafty by any means and I wanted to make a very inexpensive hat, so I used white cardstock paper and simply kept my screen set to 100% in Microsoft Word while I created black boxes and circles to match the sizes of the template (by holding them up to the screen). To print, I set the properties to “best” since “normal” would print black solids in a stripey way.
After printing, I just cut out the cone template and the cardstock at the same time for a perfect size. I ended up just using circle sizes that worked for the size of the hand you want – no template needed! One of the difficulties I faced while using the template and instructions was that she mentions that the sides of the cylinder should barely be touching; however, when I did this, the circle top was too small so I reprinted a larger one – that’s one of the beauties about making this out of paper! I think it may be easier to cut out larger circles than you think you’ll need and then size them down to the correct size to fit your cylinder. To secure all the pieces I just used Elmer’s glue and binder clips to hold it together.
To make the hat more Valentine’s-y, I printed a bunch of different sized hearts and glued them on. To get the hat to stay on Eli’s head, I used black bobby pins. For a more secure fit, alligator clips for a long haired dog or an elastic band to wrap under the head would be a much better option. I also think that you should print black shapes on both sides of the paper as some of the white would show through – especially on the bottom of the hat. I colored in some parts with black marker but forgot to do the bottom of the hat since I thought it would be hidden on his head – turns out it wasn’t. No biggie, but it did bug me a bit!
In the end, Eli’s tuxedo kept falling off of him but the hat remained and was a hit!
Aimee Knows 