Frosty the Winter/Christmas Hat Seal
If you ask me, seals are probably the cutest winter-themed animal, so I thought it would be the perfect plushie to make with a collection of removable winter and Christmas-themed hats.
Being super excited about this, I ended up drawing multiple concept ideas. However, due to the short time frame that I had, unfortunately, I couldn’t make all of them. So I made a poll on Patreon to ask which hats they wanted the most. The four most voted hats were the: Reindeer, Santa, Snowman, and Hot Chocolate.
My concept sketches of different seal hats!
Originally, I imagined making three hats in this collection and pictured them on three different colored seals: White, Gray, and Brown. But due to the extremely short time that I had and Christmas being around the corner, I wasn’t able to make multiple seals. Luckily, the hats are interchangeable so I could use the same seal for all of the hats.
The first hat that I made was the “Santa Hat”. Here’s the backstory video if you’d like to watch it. I ended up changing the design to be a “floppy” Santa hat because it made the most sense with the stitch numbers. At first, I wasn’t excited about making a Santa hat since I felt like it was a bit overrated, but after adding the floppy design, I absolutely loved the final result! Of course, I’m biased, but I think it’s my favorite Santa hat that I’ve ever seen on any plushie!
Next up was the “reindeer hat,” which was the most voted hat on Patreon. I was mostly nervous about the antlers, but they ended up working out on the first try. I was even more relieved when my pattern testers were able to follow it without any problems. Some of them even added eyes to the reindeer hat, which made it even cuter!
The third hat that I made was the “snowman” hat. Here’s the snowman hat video if you’d like to watch it. The biggest problem with this hat was that it kept looking like a “bird.” I remade the hat a few times and then decided to add a “smile,” which seemed to fix the problem. Someone also suggested that I add a scarf, so I made a blue scarf, which gave it a nice pop of color.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to finish these three seals in time for the day that I wanted to launch the pattern. So I took that extra time to make a fourth hat: the hot chocolate hat. You can watch the video on it here if you’d like.
This was my favorite hat conceptually out of the four hats. I wanted the hat to look like a mug with marshmallows and a candy cane. It was little trickier making the mug-shape with the hot chocolate inside, but it was super worth it after I figured it out.
As usual, I had the pattern tested. You can see all the seals that my testers made in this video.
Here’s where to find the pattern!
You can find the pattern in three places: my shop, Etsy marketplace, and on my Patreon. This pattern includes how to make the seal, the four hats, and also some guides like “how to make a pom pom by hand.”
I also made a BONUS seal hat that’s available only on my Patreon. Meet the “Milk and Cookies” Seal!
This “Milk and Cookies” seal pattern is found exclusively on Patreon!
This was originally my favorite concept out of all of the hats that I drew. I wanted it to look like Christmas cookies being dipped in milk. Out of all of the hats, this one was the most challenging and I wasn’t even sure at first if it would work. I’ve never seen any crochet design even similar to this before, so I wondered if it was because it just wouldn’t work out. But it did and it’s my favorite! You can watch the video on this hat here.
I hope you love this pattern as much as I do! If you share your seal on social media, don’t forget to tag me—I can’t wait to see your creations!
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