Hat block care in drought conditions, tolliker-making, and flat felt blocking

[labricoleuse]

We're in the midst of a drought (yet again) in the Carolina Piedmont, and yesterday one of my students, Samantha Greaves, noticed that a couple of her personal hatblocks were cracking and splitting from the lack of moisture in the air. Another student, Nora Rogers, is a woodworker (among other things) and recommended that she oil the cracking blocks with linseed oil, so Samantha and fellow millinery student Jennifer Mohrman spent part of their class period oiling the cracking blocks--we're all in the midst of a unit on blocked hats, so it was a great activity to do as part of their process.

Unfortunately, our state is affected by drought enough that i've written prior posts on how it can affect your day-to-day work processes and how to minimize its effects on your shop's functionality. I've now created a new post tag for them called "drought."


Here they are, all oiled up: crown blocks, band blocks, brim blocks, and puzzle block parts.




Three of my students have been working on casting a plaster tolliker press for the top of a pinch-crown block that we own. The above picture depicts two pinch-crown blocks with their original wooden tolliker presses. You don't HAVE to have one--you can pin down into the divots as you block--but they do make blocking these shapes easier. So, if you have a block without its tolliker, you can build up some oil-clay walls around the divot perimeter and cast one in plaster. Sand it smooth, sleeve it in foil and then block away!



First year Nora Rogers blocks flat wool felt onto a double-undercut puzzle block.

Randy Handley (MFA '10, handyhatter), left his collection of hat blocks in our care when he was recently hired to go on the road with Cirque de Soleil's Banana Shpeel vaudeville show. He owns a couple of really unusual puzzle blocks that we were never really able to successfully block hoods onto because of their extreme undercuts.

I mentioned above that first-year grad Nora Rogers (shown above blocking a red hat) is a woodworker, and for her final project in this class, she hopes to carve a complicated extreme wood block, and then create a hat from it. For this first blocking project then, we discussed that she might want to try blocking a hat on one of Randy's really wacko shapes, to get a better feel for what you can ask the felt to do in the blocking process and what shapes are more or less challenging to work with.

Because the two complicated puzzle blocks he owns really don't lend themselves to blocking with traditional hatbodies, i suggested she try flat felt instead, and it worked like a charm! I'll have photos of the finished hats for this project in a couple of weeks.

These incidents all give a good overall picture of how projects in my classes go--we do tackle a specific topic or medium or method, but everyone goes about it in different ways, according to their specific fields of interest or focus. Adrienne and Kaitlin might be casting tollikers in plaster for vintage pinch crowns, while Nora and Samantha explore wooden block structure and care, while Claire and Elizabeth create brim and crown rolls, while Jennifer shapes flower petals from blocked vegetable-tanned leather. We'll all watch one another's processes, jump in with ideas or extra hands to help one another out, and eventually come back together in the presentations to discuss all of the processes and discoveries. In this way, we learn as many different things about a topic as there are students in the class, and everyone gets great input and feedback on stumbling blocks or successful methodologies.


In other news, costume designer Rafael Jaen is writing some interesting stuff in his blog about the design process for the Lyric Stage's upcoming production of Nicholas Nickleby! I particularly like how he's clumping characters into costume designs for efficiency's sake. And, i wish i could see their version--they're using our whipping armor because they've cast as Smike the same actor who played him in our production! Cool!

Comments

Great post!

[dawn edwards (from livejournal.com)]

Great post. I collect antique hat blocks (and use them, too). Can't wait to see the future post with Nora's completed hat.

Wish I lived closer...Would love to be in class with all of you.

Thanks so much for sharing,
Dawn