Haughty Hattiness: a Weekend Round-Up

This blog entry has several pretty 1930s images with ladies wearing hats.
Vixen Vintage waxes oh so poetic about wearing....hats.
Styling by Cody Farquhar has an 1960s image of the same.
Talk about a sassy hat: I love this one, which matches a pair of black stilettos.
And a story from Elle, about how the fashion industry is mad for hats now.

I really should do a round-up of the best hats on the catwalks, but I'm lazy, you know? Perhaps you can leave a link to the best hats you've seen to date on and off-the-runways. I'm too busy signing up for Patternreview's hat contest. I'm doing Vogue 8175!

They Came, and didn't eat the candy: Vogue 8175*

Second time around, I had four students vs. the 9 who crowded into the Vogue Fabrics Classroom on Sunday, Feb. 15. For what lacked in human mass, we made up for in sheer number of hats, Alice, sister of Laura Proudfoot, bought a whole hatbox full of vintage chapeaux. She pulled out so many hats, I thought for sure she was a magician. How many could she possibly fit into this round cardboard the size of a floor cushion? At least five, include the saucy straw number above with its bright chartreuse vine leaves. This particular picture hat, which looks like it's from the 1940s, would be most suitable for Easter, I think. Alice also had some hats from the 1950s, and another one she made using Vogue 7476, view C, which she says, was reaaaally hard to make with lots of hand-stitching. I have a picture wearing it, but it's not very good so I skipped uploading it. Most of her finds were for a few bucks at garage sales. She'd pick up and hear, "You like that? I got more at home. They were my aunt's." Now, how often does that happen? I am not going to the right garage sales clearly.

Jenny L. Gerst had a straw hat from the 1960s or 70s (we're not sure which). She had all these ace millinery supplies, the likes of which we've never seen at Vogue Fabrics. To wit: this supremely thick millinery wire that would easily survive a gust of Chicago wind. They shoudld build locally-made umbrellas with this stuff. Plush 100 percent wool felt not seen in these parts of Illinois. Other doo-dads I know nothing about, most of which she's purchased at Judith M Millinery, a two-hour drive from the Windy City. (Incidentally, Judith M bought out Manny's Millinery after it closed.) Turns out, Jenny and I know lots of fellow milliners. Eia. Laura Hubka. Laura Whitlock.

While Jenny and Alice worked on Vogue 8175, Laura and Barbara labored over the Flirty Fedora. This was an interesting project, since the pattern was drafted for fabric with a grain. Felt doesn't have a grain which makes it so great for a beginner. Plop down. Cut. No worries about the felt going that way when it needs to go this way. Also, felt doesn't need to be lined, so Barbara and Laura skipped that part of the instructions. Laura finished her hat by the end of class. She only needs to insert her petersham ribbon inside the hat, right at the part where head meets the rought texture of the hat.

This is the last of the hat classes for Vogue 8175. But don't cry into your Pale Ale or Guinness. I'm going to teach another hat class using Vogue 8405 in March. I figure results from this workshop can either become Easter bonnets, summer hats or just something to wear during these amusing times to Costco...I hope my students eventually email pictures of themselves wearing their work. Either that I'll come after them with my terrible digital camera. That should scare them in snapping something far more flattering than my uploaded pixels. Sometimes, you just need to instill the fear of God (or my photography) to get humans to do things your way.

They Came, Cut, and Ate Oatmeal Raisin Cookies: the Vogue Fabrics Hat Workshop, no. 1

Carol Duff drove from Royal Oak, Mich. for my first hat-making class at Vogue Fabrics yesterday. Well, she was spending a couple days with her daughter, Rebecca, who also attended the workshop. So the mother-daughter came together for a little wicked weekend fun. Carol, wearing her feathered hat, arrived with enviable sewing supplies: pattern weights; sharp, spring-loaded scissors, shopping bags of wool felt not found in this part of the world: lavender, mustard, grey! The doting mother supplied Rebecca, a sewing novice, with everything she needed for her project, right down to the Schmetz universal needles.

Carol won the hat contest hands-up. She even had this most fabulous, coordinating feather boa (not pictured because it refused to cooperate with my camera). So I gave her a bag of goodies that included a vintage plastic buckle still in its original package, a zipper, Russian veiling, two faux feathers, circa 1940s, and at least two packages of new ribbon. There were a few other items, but I've since forgotten them.

Moving on:

Maria Carlos happily marking up her version of Vogue 8175 with chalk. While she hails from the Chicago area, she takes time out of her busy schedule, which including caring for her 80-something mother, to come to Vogue Fabrics and create magic. She says she sometimes she signs up for a seminar, shows up late, and stays to do her own thing in the classroom to do her own thing even though everyone else has left with a finished project or to head off to a local bar to forget their sewing troubles with a glass of Merlot (isn't this normal for most women?). Maria is also a regular at Vogue Fabrics' Monday night free sewing demos.

Another out-of-towner from Wisconsin, Stephanie Walter (far left) wires the brim of her hat. She actually checked in early for the workshop, worked non-stop through the three hours of the class. Even though there was some hand-sewing (the edge of the brim), she was the only one of the 9 students who walked out the classroom door with a finished chapeau, minus the petersham stitched inside the hat. She walked out too quickly for me to capture her work of art on my digital camera. Darn!
Maria again, testing her her hat, which initially looked like a habit-in-the-making from Doubt's costume-department. Maria is returning for next week's class ready to dive into another hat-making project. Talk about dedication!

Here's what I learned from the first class:
* Remove the pillows displayed on the wall if you want decent pictures. In nearly every photo I took, almost all students looks like they have something sticking out of the back of their heads. One student wore a great 1940s red hat trimmed with white and black petersham, but every one of those blasted pillows ruined my photos. I couldn't even crop them out. However, I will not go so far as taking down the mirror and the thread organizer. I would love to cut out a hole somewhere to make a window. Natural light, where are thee?
* Hand out name tags. It's the best way to keep Carol and Carolyn straight and from turning Henette into Henrietta.
* Not all fabric yardage is alike. I said 3/8 of a yard of fabric on my supply list, which would have been correct if the wool felt in stock weren't so narrow. Darn fabric!
* Expect to leave with a nearly full container of cookies, since it appears most women seem to watch what they eat. At least they're too busy sewing, not munching.

That is all.

Considering the Flirty Fedora in Wool Felt

There are days when I tell people I'm a hat-maker just to be silly. There are even months even I pretend I'm a milliner with hats so beautiful that they are snatched out of the window display within minutes of their debut. There are even years when I contemplate filling out the occupation section on my income tax forms with that word: hat designer. Some decades (I've been living a while, it just doesn't readily show) I even dream of pitching it all (the residence, the family and the clothes) and just moving somewhere like Australia or England where hats are a Way of Life, not just something amusing like they are here.

Which is a sort of a long way of saying that I think that I've arrived, at least in the town of my birth (Evanston, Ill.). My first hat-making class on February 1 is nearly full. To date, no one is interested in learning how to make a poodle skirt, a tie or even an apron. But a hat? Bring it on, shut down the business office and get me signed up! I've got seven milliners-in-the-making on the list for the first workshop, another two signed up for the one on the 22nd.

Now the hat I really wanted to work on was Vogue 8175, but wouldn't you know not only is now out-of-print, it's unavailable on the Vogue Patterns web site. Views E and F - which have that 1930s tyrolean theme going - are extraordinarily easy to make. However, if it's not available to the masses, I can't use it to instruct my students. To my great (about the size of the Grand Canyon) disappointment I cannot use Vogue 8175 - although if any of my students finds it, he/she is more than welcome to use it.

So...I have to use another pattern. I'm reluctantly selecting the Flirty Fedora. My biggest reservation is that it doesn't call for wool felt, the fabric of choice for Vogue 8175. But I'm going to use the high-quality wool fiber (which differs significantly from craft felt, friends) for the fedora. It will be an experiment of the Tim Gunn "Make It Work" school of thought, but I'm really confident wool felt will be more than up to the task.

Since the wool felt is so firm, I don't think I need to do all that stitching on the brim. I don't consider the top stitching on the crown essential either. Now the profile of the fedora vs. Vogue's rendition looks a little more 1960s Twiggy or Babe Paley ready to hit the social circuits and less Katharine Hepburn or Ginger Rogers headed to the local dance club for a little jitterbug, but that's ok. But I'm cool with that alternative silhouette if my students are.

Now I might purchase the Flirty Fedora to try it on for size (where did that expression come from anyhow?), and so I can converse knowledgeably with my workshop participants. I can also have a completed project for show-and-tell, which helps all those who are visual learners. Ideally, I should have both the Vogue 8175 (it sounds like I'm talking about a product, and not some unique work of art) and the Flirty Fedora, so the two will be on hand on the first of the month. What would be nifty is if I made both hats in the same fabric, and embellished each differently. But who needs two hats in the same color, fabric? Not me. Boring!

Anyhow, part of me is hankering to make a hat in bright raincoat-yellow, something that would be a huge jolt of color in our bleak Chicago landscape. I could see that with a small brown feather, worn with a smart black and white houndstooth jacket. Shoulder pads mandatory! (That's me, although you might disagree fervently.) Vogue Fabrics only has the wool felt in black and white in the Evanston store. Rogie Sussman tells me there will be some hat-worthy felt online. For something really unique, I'd try felting - buy an ounce or two of the roving that's near the sewing machine department. Cut the hat parts, felt, sew to make a conversation piece that will start on the street and end with you getting a free drink somewhere! What do you think?