Miss Hendrie's Workbook: millinery

Showing posts with label millinery. Show all posts

Sunday, 27 August 2017

World War I QAIMNS nurse hat

In 2014 I made a World War I QAIMNS nurse uniform, and I’ve worn it a lot since, at several memorable World War I events. My group has, for instance, portrayed a hospital stationed inside a country house, at Museum Huis Doorn.

Now, we’ve added the ‘walking out’ or parade version of the uniform to our repertoire. This means: no apron, no cuffs, a hat instead of a veil, and white gloves.

The hats, naturally, we had to fashion ourselves. Here’s a QAIMNS hat from the collection of the Imperial War Museum, which I used as my main example:

http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30091619

We ordered a number of grey wool felt hats, but they had a pretty weird shape, with a round rather than an oval crown. This made it hard for me to get the hat to fit properly, because the brim would get wavy when I put it on, but some steam pressing did improve it.

Unfortunately we could not buy the same ribbon that was used at the time. We could have had some made, but only by the roll of 200 metres or so, and we needed about 10. But as the colours were similar to Iron Cross ribbon, we used that, and sewed grey ribbon onto it.

To make the ribbon fit around the crown without all too much puckering, I eased the different ribbons onto each other. First I eased the Iron Cross ribbon onto the top grey ribbon, and then I did the opposite, easing the bottom grey ribbon onto the Iron Cross ribbon. It’s quite amazing how big an effect this had on the shape of the ribbon, as you can see below (the left part of the ribbon was sewn normally, without easing on).

I made the flat bow out of three different pieces of ribbon, since actually tying the ribbon into a bow would have made it bulkier than the bow on the IWM hat.

And here’s the hat sewn up:

We first wore the walking out uniform at the recent Passchendaele event at Zonnebeke in Belgium. It was particularly suitable to wear to the remembrance church service.

Even our hairstyles were uniform here! =)

Saturday, 23 July 2016

Women’s Land Army hat

Haberdasheries: 80 cm (part) cotton 1” wide grosgrain ribbon, WLA badge

Oh dear, the last time I posted was april! It probably seems like I didn’t do anything for several months, but I did sew – mainly alterations and other things that weren’t really blog-worthy though.

But here’s something I’ve made that I do think is worth posting: a World War 2 Women’s Land Army (WLA) hat. Obviously I didn’t make this as a standalone item, but am working on a complete WLA uniform. Most of which I, happily, have been able to buy instead of sew! The only thing I’m missing is the sweater, which is rather hard to come by in wool.

You can find photos of the WLA on my WLA Pinterest page.

I bought the 100% wool brown hat on sale at H&M. Here’s how it looked before I customised it:

The main example I used to base my hat on, was this one from the Imperial War Museum:

http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30090744?cat=uniforms%2520and%2520insignia

Hat: Women’s Land Army © IWM (UNI 73)

As you can see, the hat has a very particular shape. I expected it would be no problem to permanently reshape my hat, simply by wetting it, shaping it and letting it dry. But what was I going to use as a mould? Eventually I found several items that had the right size to form the mould:

And once I had found those, it was indeed very easy to shape the hat. After the hat had dried (which took rather a long time!), I cut about 4 cm from the brim. I sewed on an at least part cotton beige grosgrain ribbon (it was difficult to source the right colour AND width, but eventually I found the right ribbon on Etsy), and pinned on the reproduction WLA badge. And here’s the result!

I did a quick, untidy, sort of ‘40s updo to model the hat. Naturally I’ll post photos of the entire uniform once I’ve worn it, but I don’t know when that will be!