I review a lot of lolita and loliable patterns here.
The bonnet for Simplicity 8443 is the worst lolita pattern I have ever seen. The bonnet for Simplicity 8443 is maybe the worst pattern I’ve ever seen produced by a professional pattern company. Simplicity 8443 is maybe the worst pattern I have EVER USED that was made by someone outside of the first week of Intro To Patternmaking Sewing 201 classes.
It’s bad, folks. It doesn’t look like the worst thing ever on the envelope, but it’s bad.
How bad? Well, I made it and I’ll talk about that in a bit, but let’s check out any red flags we could see before we decide to commit and make it.
But first, let’s look at a premade bonnet that I own. This is a soft, full bonnet from Baby The Stars Shine Bright:
Sorry for the rumpled picture.
A full bonnet covers the back of your head. The more popular half bonnet leaves the back of your head open, which makes your hair much easier to style.
A soft bonnet is what it says on the tin: it’s not stiff or structured. There’s interfacing in the brim, but no wiring or cardstock-level stabilizer. It keeps its shape by being constructed and patterned for doing that. The brim leans on the band and the band ties to your head and all that stops it from falling down. This means that it can’t defy gravity more than a certain amount without losing its bonnet-ness.
It’s important to keep old school soft full bonnets in mind, because that is where we derive the shape of the hard, half bonnet. Straying too much from the full bonnet shape can get into ita, ageplay, or bad sci-fi territory.
1) Brocade Panne Bonnet, Surface Spell. 2) Dark Printe Bonnet, Infanta. 3) Fire Signs Collection Bonnet, Arcadian Deer. 4) Layered Lacy Floral Baby Vintage Style Bonnet <nice name>, Crucis Universal Tailor Company. 5) Summer Maidens Theme Bonnet, Souffle Song. 6) Rose Sanctuary Bonnet, Infanta.
So here’s some half bonnets to keep in mind what half bonnets look like. I just grabbed some images from a search on DevilInspired, and just grabbed every picture where the side was showing.
As you can see, there’s two elements to the basic bonnet construction: the brim and the band. The brim is the fan-shaped piece that frames the wearer’s face, and the band sits behind that, on top of the head. The band often goes down over the wearer’s ears.
With our new bonnet education in mind, let’s look at Simplicity 8443, view B.
So, going to say it once so that we don’t have to address it again: There is no reason for the cat ears. The cat ears are stupid. Moving on.
So, for starters, red flag number one, why is there a band in front of the brim? The ribbon clearly comes from that, which makes you worry about what the band of the bonnet must look like.
The other picture you get doesn’t really help you understand what’s happening. Simplicity very carefully chose to not show the sides or back of this bonnet.
The pattern is four pieces, and the only thing that looks like a band is actually that casing the ribbon goes in.
Spoiler: there is no band.
It just ends. It just stops existing.
Let’s talk angle for a second.
I was careful to not distort the bottom arch of the bonnet band, which would change the angle that the bonnet sits on my head. This was not easy, but this is the intended angle that Simplicity wants the bonnet to sit.
Look at that bonnet compilation. Now back to this. Those aren’t the same. This is a damn plate stuck on your face.
That’s pretty bad. That’s bad enough to make the bonnet unusable. But it’s not the worst part.
There are no words for the construction of this bonnet than incorrect and insulting. Here’s a basic rundown:
You have a front piece and a back piece. You sew them together. Turn to front. This is fine. If you’re making this with cat ears (don’t), you might have trouble clipping your corners. You insert a piece of ultra-firm stabalizer (peltex/pellon 70) into the pocket that you made between the two pieces. This is tricky, but not really an incorrect way to handle this situation. The cat ears will make this much harder. There’s a front piece to be gathered (called the drape in the instructions). You gather the bottom piece, but the top is meant to be the same size as the top of the bonnet. You gather the bottom to the length of the bottom of the brim, and sew it into place. You sew a trim to the top edge.
Now you bust out your hot glue gun and just glue the top edge together. The sides of the pattern and the sides of the bonnet don’t match and you have excess. The top isn’t quite short enough (probably due to those sides being the wrong shape) and you have to pleat it or hide it somehow. There’s no gathering threads to do this; you just are expected to kind of wing it.
Keep that damn hot glue gun hot. We’re going back to fold the casing in half (no instructions for finishing off the sides where the ribbon comes out) and sew that onto the front. There’s a raw edge at the bottom of the brim. You just leave that there. I disapprove. Grab your glue gun and glue some lace onto that thing like this is a child’s halloween costume that has to last one night, because now this thing is done. Enjoy your fraying edge. It’s there to stay. I read the instructions so many times in the hopes that there’s a way that they intend you to solve this other than hot glue. I did not find one.
Now just take this thing and call it done. If I turned this pattern in as a project in a class, I’d get a C- at best.
Yes, there’s instructions to glue trim over the wrong edges, and no, I didn’t do that, because I’m not about to throw decent lace in the trash, and I don’t have any burner lace at the moment. That’s not the point.
This pattern is sloppy. The method of construction is sloppy. This pattern has “we wrote this off as a costume” written all over it.
It’s so sloppy. It’s not thought out. No one cared about this pattern. No one considered this as clothes. This was intended to be a one-off costume piece.
Also, just a heads up, if you’re not really careful with the colors then this turns into the kind of costume bonnet that you get with a “big adult baby” Party City costume (or worse). If you already have problems convincing the locals that wanting to be a different age isn’t a factor in how you dress, you probably want to steer away from this pattern. Also if you just want a real bonnet, it’s not a good pattern. It’s just not a good pattern.
Handily. McCall’s has a pattern that really looks like a decent actual half bonnet. I bought it, but haven’t actually tested it out yet. My only negative so far is that it has you use a coat hanger instead of something like plastic boning on the rim, and that can make the wrinkle you see in the back view. That’s an easy swap and I think it’ll make this a good option. At least it has a band in the back and goes down far enough to cover your ears.
Simplicity already has an established history of making bonnet patterns that are totally the wrong shape. As far as I can tell, they only ever saw a bonnet from the front, once, and have a bad memory.