Playgrounders with experience with stitching; I need help modifying a hat

[BisectedBrioche]

To cut a long story short, a friend of mine challenged me to make a hat which resembles the one worn by my favorite class from the Disgaea series; the Thief. For reference the image below uses a brown palette, but I'm going for a red one, as seen in the second image;

http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100116234044/disgaea/en/images/d/d2/Dis2-thief.jpg
http://img102.imageshack.us/img102/521/compilation.png

Anyway, I thought the best way to go about it would be to modify an existing hat. So I've bought a couple of cheap beanies off Amazon.co.uk's market place. My idea is to stitch them together somehow to form the "cat ear" shapes. The thing is while I have some experience stitching (mostly repairing my clothes and some embroidery when I was in secondary school) and I have a sewing kit (a basic one with needles, pins, scissors and an unpicking tool) somewhere, I have no idea what the best way to cut and restitch the hats would be.

The hats are made of polyester fleece. They're hemispherical in shape and appear to be made of two quarter-sphere's stitched together with a couple of perpendicular seams to give the top a cross pattern (in other words, a generic beanie hat (http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/411F72q2tRL._SS500_.jpg)).

Any ideas?

[Quincunx]

Those are simple triangles and it's just the quality of the hat fabric that they only half-collapse and stick up in interesting peaks--maybe a bit of stuffing inside each peak to make sure it doesn't collapse, but not much. Luckily polyester fleece behaves exactly the way you need it to.

Pick apart one of your hats into two half-circles; cut off the rectangular band and set it aside for another project. Pick apart on another hat that seam which connects the hemispheres, but don't detach the band. Fold each half-circle piece in half to make your cat ears, put the folded edge against the point where band and half-assembled hat meet, and sew each flat edge of the cat ear to either side of the unpicked seam. Now the hat is flopping apart at the top, and just sew the cat ears shut from fold to fold. That's the rough approximation of the hat shape you need.

[BisectedBrioche]

Those are simple triangles and it's just the quality of the hat fabric that they only half-collapse and stick up in interesting peaks--maybe a bit of stuffing inside each peak to make sure it doesn't collapse, but not much. Luckily polyester fleece behaves exactly the way you need it to.

Pick apart one of your hats into two half-circles; cut off the rectangular band and set it aside for another project. Pick apart on another hat that seam which connects the hemispheres, but don't detach the band. Fold each half-circle piece in half to make your cat ears, put the folded edge against the point where band and half-assembled hat meet, and sew each flat edge of the cat ear to either side of the unpicked seam. Now the hat is flopping apart at the top, and just sew the cat ears shut from fold to fold. That's the rough approximation of the hat shape you need.

Thanks but I'm finding that kind of hard to follow (or maybe it's just because I'm tired right now).:smallredface:

Also, the band appears to simply be part of the hat folded in on itself, does that make a difference?

EDIT: OK, a 7 hours sleep and a few hours of post-lecture seat napping have made a difference. I understand it now. Thanks. :smallbiggrin:

The thing is, that would make a hat with a pair of 2D cat ears attached, the thief's hat seems to be more of a beany with two points that resemble ears...

Another EDIT: After taking one of the hats apart I've found that half the stitching was cosmetic (or not...well read on). It seems the entire thing was formed from one piece of fabric. Here's a photo of what it looks like unstitched (not very good quality, but you can tell the shape at least);

http://img245.imageshack.us/img245/8258/dscn0140b.jpg