The Day Santa and Buddy the Elf Galloped Into Town

I'm not one to dress up a horse.  I think the whole costume thing at horse shows and barns is completely over the top.  It seems like people get more and more elaborate with their costumes every year and I don't see it ever ending.

But, I do think these Santa and Buddy the Elf hats are too cute not to put them on every horse out there!

I can't remember how it started. I must have been looking for a Santa hat that would fit a horse and a quick search came up with typical Santa hats with cut outs for the ears, crocheted versions that go on kind of like a fly mask and all kinds of iterations of what you'd expect when looking for a Santa hat.  

Somewhere along the way, I got the idea that maybe it should be smaller and not actually go over the ears.  First of all, I think it looks silly to have horse ears poking out of a Santa hat and second, I don't think horses love things touching their ears.  Have you noticed people spend a lot of time touching a horse's ears? Maybe because they are big and we are in awe of them. Maybe just because they are soft.  Maybe because people don't know what to do around horses so touching their ears seems reasonable.

I see a lot of horses not loving their ears being touched and I think about how some people can't wear sunglasses because they don't like them pressing on the backs of their ears.  What if horses get that same kind of nauseated feeling when something sits against their ears?

All of those thoughts led me to making something that could sit between the ears and hopefully not touch them. I took a cone shape, did some math and figured out how big the circle needed to be for the bottom and got to work.  I wish I remembered if I did some serious thinking about the size or if the first cone I tried was just the right size. 

It's pretty likely that one day, I saw something about how to make a party hat for kids and one thing led to another and when I used the dimensions, I thought "hey, this would be a great hat for a horse".  I don't usually have an idea AND the mathematical reasoning to produce said idea that easily.  I might have had to tweak the size slightly, but I know I didn't spend a lot of time figuring out the size, so it might have been pretty close on the first try.

I wish I could say that along with all of my engineering skills, I thought long and hard about the materials and actual construction but if you're looking for that kind of precision on the backend, you will not find it here. All of my ideas and subsequent renditions of those ideas are held together with duct tape and dreams and then if I end up with a successful result, I forget how I got there and I have to backward design it and write it down for the next time.  

Did you think I made those careful decisions along the way and wrote them down as I went? That would be so helpful but that's just not how I operate in real life.

I had red felt on hand, so I took that and made the cone.  Then I realized it wasn't going to be stiff enough to just sit on the head and stand upright, so I decided it should be stuffed.  Before I got to stuffing, I knew I wanted that fur trim along the bottom and I had just enough left over from the cuffs of  a Santa dress I made.  Let me tell you, putting that trim on before stuffing and closing up the hat was the best thought I ever had. Usually, this thought would come to me after it was all assembled and I'd be trying to sew it on by hand and crying.  Machine sewing it on before closing is brilliant.

I use polyfill as my stuffing agent.  It's very lightweight.  I have made some with pieces of fabric scraps as added filling but that can ge heavy pretty quickly and my main goal here is not to irritate the horse.

Humans have this weird thing about needed to put bells on horses.  Jingle Bells wasn't written by accident.  Sleighs seem to always have bells on them. Everything Christmas requires bells. I enjoy a jingly bell as much as the next person, but I also tire of the sound pretty quickly.  

Imagine being a horse and having to hear tingalingaling with every step and breath you take and the faster you move, the more jingly it gets.  

I say this because I was going to put a bell on the top and it was going to be so cute.  And then I realized that no horse wants that sound between its ears for any length of time, so I chose a pompom instead.  It's also very cute to see the little pompom bouncing along as we go!

The pompom must also be installed before stuffing and closing.  After making many of these, and worrying about the pompom pulling out, I have learned to sew the yarn ties to the felt on the inside so they stay where they belong.

How does it attach? Velcro is the best friend anyone with a horse can ever have! My first versions of this used pieces of velcro that were just big enough to loop around the top of my bridle.  Over time, I learned that bridles and halters are all different sizes, so I've made the strips longer and tell people to cut them to fit.  They easily wrap right over the top of the bridle or halter and fasten so there should be nothing scratching the top of the head.

Sewing the whole thing closed can be tricky.  With the Santa hats, the fur on around the bottom is a good decoy so when I sew the two red parts together, I can take a decent sized seam.  I do this before I stuff, leaving an opening to stuff them and then I just hand sew them closed.  Once it's finished, I fluff the white fur and make sure it's covering that seam. I always try to get a fluffy fur trim for just this reason. I thought about using white felt but it just looked cheap, to me. Once it's on the horse's head, you can't see the seam, but I like to make sure everything looks decent on or off the horse.

Once I got the Santa hat situated, I started thinking about an elf hat to sell in my Etsy shop.  And I kept finding Buddy the Elf pictures so I got to thinking and this is what I came up with. 

This one takes longer to make because of the different colors but I love the fact that I can get the red leaf from all of the red scraps left over from the Santa hat!

Many years ago, I made a Halloween costume for a friend's kid and I had to get a ton of felt.  I still had a lot of green and yellow left over, so this might have been the reason that Buddy the Elf made the most sense to me! 

There is no fur trim on the bottom of Buddy's hat, so I'm not especially thrilled with the way the seam shows.  I like have something to cover it. I made some with the seam on the inside and then sewed it closed once I stuffed it, but they always seemed perched to me, even on a horse.  They didn't sit as well as the Santa hats.

This time around, I zigzagged the bottom circles on and left that seam exposed. It doesn't look horrible, but it's not really as smooth as I'd like it to be.

I made the Buddy the Elf hat from the same pattern as the Santa hat, so the bottom circle is exactly the same.  This is helpful so I remember how to put it together! I do the same thing with the velcro and they fit the same way.

While I was getting the red velcro, I didn't even think about also getting green.  That would have been really smart!  Once the velcro wraps around the halter or bridle you can't see it, but as I might have said before, I like things to look like some thought went into them if I'm going to sell them.

I don't usually do craft fairs and the few horse things I make are so specific to horses, I don't think they would sell at a typical craft fair. I also have zero patience to sit at a craft fair and answer 50 bajillion questions and hear people tell me how they could make it cheaper.

BUT....one of the local farm and pet stores is having a vendor sale this fall so I signed up to do that one.  In anticipation of that, I actually batch sewed a bunch of both styles of hat so my sewing room looks kind of insane right now.

And that's not all of the Santa hats.  I ran out of polyfill so I have another 5 waiting to be stuffed.

If you or some one you know has a horse that needs to be Santa or Buddy the Elf, hop on over to my Etsy shop before they're gone!