1915 hat

Pattern: none, I improvised.

Fabric: a strip of buckram, natural coloured linen for lining, black cotton velvet.

Haberdasheries: six turkey feathers, 35 cm of black lace.

Finally, a post I can tag ‘millinery’! =) I’ve made quite a few hats, but I find it really difficult to decorate them in a nice way, so they tend not to reach the ‘finished’ state and I don’t post them. I really like how this one’s turned out, though.

I’m making a 1915 suit, and wanted a modern hat to wear with it, not one of those large Edwardian ones. Lots of images of 1915 fashion had cylinder-shaped hats like these:

So I decided to make a simple cylinder out of buckram, line it and cover it with black velvet in pleats. Then I’d add some turkey feathers I already had, in a fan shape on the side.

Searching for 1915 hats, I also found several which had crazy feathers!

Hm, these ladies don’t all look equally happy with their hats… I certainly wasn’t planning to make anything like this, I just saved the images for fun. But somehow the upright feather stuck, and I ended up making this:

I wore it to the event at Passchendaele Memorial Museum last weekend. It is NOT handy when getting in and out of a tent! Or when walking through the dugout part of the museum, for that matter. Of course I didn’t think of that, but holding my hat in my hand worked well enough.