Runaway October

Step One: Choose an accept­able shirt — such as the long-sleeved one hid­ing in the back of your hus­bands dresser that you’ve seen worn once for 5 min­utes. Even then it was obvi­ous that the sleeves were much too short. Make sure it’s stretchy and warm — knits and fleece are great for this.

Step Two: Mea­sure your child’s, or your own, head. Take two mea­sure­ments — One around the biggest part of the head, where the brim of a hat nor­mally sits. The sec­ond mea­sure­ment is taken from between the eyes over the head to the base of the skull. Don’t worry about being exact, we mainly are mak­ing sure that we make it big enough to fit prop­erly on the nog­gin and isn’t too small.

Then add an inch for seam allowances to both mea­sure­ments. If you are going to reuse the seam along the bot­tom of the T-Shirt these are your final mea­sure­ments. If you need to add your own hem, add an extra 1″ to the eye to nape measurement.

For exam­ple:

Reusing hem — Declan’s head cir­cum­fer­ence is 20″ and the eye-to-nape mea­sure­ment is 15″, so after adding seam allowances I have a mea­sure­ment of 21″ x 16″. Now divide that mea­sure­ment by 2, which equals 10.5″ x 8″.

Not reusing hem — Declan’s head cir­cum­fer­ence is 20″ and the eye-to-nape mea­sure­ment is 15″, so after adding seam allowances I have a mea­sure­ment of 21″ x 16″. Then I add an addi­tional inch to the eye-to-nape mea­sure­ment which is now 21″ x 17″. Now divide that mea­sure­ment by 2, which equals 10.5″ x 8.5″.

Step Three: Lay out the shirt you found and cut two rec­tan­gles using the size we deter­mined above. If you don’t have the child around to mea­sure, Declan has a pretty stan­dard sized 2yo head. I like to iron the shirt out flat and cut the two pieces at the same time using a rotary cut­ter. Make sure to feign inno­cence when your hus­band finds you shred­ding his old “paint­balling shirt”. You’ve never seen him go paint­balling anyway.

Step Four: With wrong sides together, sew together one long side of the rec­tan­gle. Now grab a ruler and make a mark 3/4″ in on the unsewn long side of the rec­tan­gle. Make another mark 1/4″ in at the top. Con­nect the marks using a ruler to deter­mine your seams for the short sides of the rec­tan­gle. This, along with the stan­dard 1/4″ seam, will ensure that the skully will fit around the head with­out gap­ping. Sew up the seams you just drew.

Now your skully should start to take shape.

Step Five: Fold the open­ing up by 1/4″ or what­ever you would like. Press and sew to form the bot­tom hem. Turn right side out. Viola! It’s seri­ously as sim­ple as that.

To make the lit­tle ears, cut some strips from what­ever fab­ric — I like to use strips of the knit T-Shirt because it will stop unrav­el­ing if you stretch it out — and tie them at the cor­ners using a square knot. The size of the ear deter­mines the final shape of the skully, though they all look the same while being worn.

Lit­tle adorn­ments are easy to make if you hap­pen to have some HeatNBond lay­ing around. Basi­cally just cut out your shape from a coör­di­nat­ing fab­ric, iron the HeatNBond to the wrong side, peel the back­ing and iron it onto the Skully in the desired loca­tion. I then go around the edges with a Zigzag stitch just to make sure it stays on and give it a cute lit­tle flair.

You can also use one long rec­tan­gle and fold it in half so there is no seam in the top.

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