1) Cover your work surface with plastic covering
2) Using a plastic spray bottle, presoak the sides and brim of hat.
3) Grab your rubber gloves. Shake and measure ½ cup of Rit Denim Dye into one gallon of very hot 140˚ water and stir well.
4) Holding the hat from the front point, dip brim-side down, straight into the dye bath halfway up the side of hat. Then lift a bit so only the brim is submerged into the dye bath. It's a little tricky to get a nice gradual tone evenly around the hat, so keep an eye on it. If one side has a darker shade, just dip momentarily to the other side to even it out. The total dye time took about 3-4 minutes.
5) Still holding the hat from the top front point, rinse under cool water until the water runs clear. This keeps any excess dye flowing toward the darkest part of the hat along the brim.
6) Reshape the hat and line with a layer of white tissue paper. Then stuff with newspaper and let set until dry. The tissue paper is to check that all the excess dye has been washed out. If there's any blue color-bleed on the tissue, go wash it out again. It's easy to miss it. I had to do a second rinse myself.

7) After the hat has dried, you can really embellish it any way you like. I cut a 1" strip from a pair of old jeans and hot glue'd on for a hat band.
8) Then using the same jeans, I cut various strips and made these sweet raw-edged flowers. I learned this clever technique from a video that Erin Basset so generously made recently. Go check it out here:
http://www.erinbassett.com/creativite/2010/02/7.html
Cool, huh? Then I cut and hot glue'd a few denim leaves.

9) Oh, and just cause I can't control myself, I dyed a few white buttons to accent the flowers as well. It's really easy to dye buttons as well. Here's a tutorial for that technique too if you want to try it out.
http://www.ediesfashionfactory.com/2010/03/its-color-wheel-of-dyed-bead-bracelets.html
I also have that tutorial here on CO&K so you find it there too.

There you have it, friends, my super-elegant, super-chic fedora. Say good-bye to bad hair days forevah!

Wow, the supply list feature is still kinda whacked!
Here's what I used cause it's not showing up correctly on the top of the page.