Do you have old manga books lying around which you’re planing to throw away? Here is an idea of what you can do to recycle your old manga.

Within any typical shojo manga you will almost always find a character that dresses in the lolita style, this tutorial will show you how to make those lolita style hats using the same material you find them in!

What you need:

• 1 Manga book or thick paper
• Scissors
• Hot Glue
• Sticky tape or Masking tape
• Glue stick
• Compass
• Ruler
• (optional) single hole puncher
• Stanley Knife
• 2 alligator hair clips

To watch a video of how I made my hat click here It’ll probably make my tutorial make more sense

Steps:

1. Carefully pull apart the manga book and cut off the side you ripped so you get 4 nice and straight sides.
2. Measure the length of the shortest side. This will be the diameter of you hat.
3. Set your compass half of this length and place the needle end in the middle of the manga paper, draw a circle.
4. Grab 2 more sheets of manga paper and glue it directly on the bottom of you drawn circle. So you will have three layers of paper.
5. Cut around the circle you drew. This is the base of the hat.
6. Get another sheet of paper and on one side of the paper measure out 7cm and draw a line, within this rectangle leave a 1cm gap from drawn side and the edge of the paper and draw in those two lines. On the other side of the paper measure out 5cm and draw a line.



7. Cut out the 5cm strip aswell as the 7cm strip. The 2 lines in the 7cm strip will help guide you in the next step. Don’t cut these out!
8. Grab your 7cm strip and cut into the strip but stop at the line you drew. The picture below shows you where to cut, the thin lines indicate the places you cut. These will create little flaps.
9. 
10. Glue the 5cm strip inside the 7cm strip, it should fit perfectly between the 2 drawn lines. The pencil lines will help guide you. Now stick the two ends together with stick tape and fold in the flaps you cut before. This now becomes like a roll.
11. Grab 2 sheets of manga and glue them on top of each other.
12. Making sure your roll is nice a circular, glue it directly onto the manga sheets using hot glue. Wait to dry then cut around the roll. You just made the top of your hat!
13. Now find the perfect spot on your hat base to stick the roll into. Glue it down with hot glue.
14. Now that we have the basic hat shape complete it’s time to decorate. Yay! Once you finished decorating glue 2 aligator hair clips to the bottom of your hat on opposite sides.
15. These steps now are optional . You can make a veil for your hat It’s best to watch my video for this step.

. Draw a shape for the veil and cut out 2 of them. Draw inside the shape a 1/2 cm border to the edge(can be roughly drawn) and using a Stanley knife cut out diagonals in one direction. For the second veil shape cut it in the other direction. This will create a mesh or lattice effect when stacked on top of each other. Use hotglue or craft glue to join them together.

16. Don’t throw away any scrap pieces of manga, you can always scrunch up little bits for “pearls”
17. If you can make origami flowers it’ll be great to add to your hat. If not you can cut a 4cm strip of manga, pinch and roll the paper together, stickytape that end and using you scissors, hack into the rolled paper, then flare it out.
18. The single hole puncher is great for making “lace”
19. If you’re stuck on decorating, have a look at my other manga hats for some inspiration at my deviantart page.