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Willow brim block, part one!
Feb. 10th, 2010 10:17 pmThe show on deck right now is Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, which affords me the opportunity to do a bunch of great craftwork. There are two hats in particular for the character of Lady Bracknell which i'll be chronicling in detail, as they involve a topic near and dear to the modern milliner's mythos: willow.
Willow is pretty much the North American milliner's Holy Grail. Even when it was more commonly used, it was never easy or cheap to obtain here; it's made from an indiginous Spanish grass called esparto, bonded with starch to a layer of fine cotton crinoline. The crinoline side is the right side, and the esparto side is the wrong side. It's known by a host of other names: willow-plate, willowing, esparterie, espartre, espartra, sparterie, and spartre.
Esparto grass grows best in southern Spain and northern Africa, and is also known by a lot of other names: Spanish grass, alfa grass, alpha fibre, halfah grass, and atocha. Japan apparently got into the willow market at one point, raising esparto in rice paddies, though the climate there produces a brittler version of esparto than the Mediterranean does, so the Japanese willow is/was considered "inferior" as a result.
Whatever you call it, nowadays, it's rare as the dodo. Some folks say that it's no longer being manufactured; I used to buy that, but then i kept reading articles about Philip Treacy and his block-carver, Lorenzo Re, using sparterie in his block-conceptualizing process. If Philip Treacy is commissioning hatblocks from his own hand-formed sparterie sculptures, he must have a modern source, perhaps making it just for the high-end couture market. He's not using 50-year-old sheets of willow.
I'm not Philip Treacy though, so that's exactly what i'm doing.
When i first took the crafts artisan job at PlayMakers, i went through all the supplies in every drawer and cabinet and nook and cranny, taking stock of what i had to determine an initial inventory. In the course of that stocktaking, i discovered an amazing treasure-trove: four sheets of vintage willow in pristine condition.
The way it felt to find them, well, i think i have a tiny glimmer of an idea how Howard Carter's excavation team felt when they found that first step leading down to King Tut's tomb.
"Holy crap, this is it!"
I knew the minute i saw it what it was, the minute i touched it, despite having only read about it in millinery texts: esparterie.
For the past five years i have hoarded it, providing my millinery students with tiny 1" samples as part of our media swatch cards, and once allowing one student to cut a tiny sideband for a miniature burlesque top hat from half of one sheet. I've been waiting for the right show, in the right time period, with the right costume designer, someone who'd design a willow-appropriate hat for a performer i could trust to wear such a thing with care.
It's like some string of portents in a sword-and-sorcery novel: that time has come.
This is that show, and our designer, Anne Kennedy, is someone I've got a very good communicative rapport with, and for whom i've made many interesting hats. Lady Bracknell is to be played by PRC company actor Ray Dooley, a consummate professional who treats his hats with respect and care.
Today, I began the process of working with willow.
So, Lady Bracknell has two hats, one of which is a small tilted-brim Eugenie hat modeled on a derby crown shape, and the other a wide assymetrical-brim confection with a pinch crown and a pile of feathers. Both will be blocked in wool felt, eventually. But to block a hat, you need a hat block, yes?
It's no problem for me to block the crowns of these hats. I've got a great new pinch crown block i'm itching to break in, and a small 21" dome block will serve for the Derby-Eugenie. But the brims, that's another story. I could carve them from blue foam, like i did the Rich Lady hyperboloid-crown bonnet from Nicholas Nickleby...but blue foam has to be cut up and stacked up and glued and carved, and these brim shapes could be done easier and quicker using a sparterie block.
There's some great information on making brims and brim blocks in Denise Dreher's book From the Neck Up, and also in Jane Loewen's 1925 text, Millinery. I pored over them, planned out my shapes, and set to work.
( Images of shaping willow for the Derby-Eugenie )
Willow is pretty much the North American milliner's Holy Grail. Even when it was more commonly used, it was never easy or cheap to obtain here; it's made from an indiginous Spanish grass called esparto, bonded with starch to a layer of fine cotton crinoline. The crinoline side is the right side, and the esparto side is the wrong side. It's known by a host of other names: willow-plate, willowing, esparterie, espartre, espartra, sparterie, and spartre.
Esparto grass grows best in southern Spain and northern Africa, and is also known by a lot of other names: Spanish grass, alfa grass, alpha fibre, halfah grass, and atocha. Japan apparently got into the willow market at one point, raising esparto in rice paddies, though the climate there produces a brittler version of esparto than the Mediterranean does, so the Japanese willow is/was considered "inferior" as a result.
Whatever you call it, nowadays, it's rare as the dodo. Some folks say that it's no longer being manufactured; I used to buy that, but then i kept reading articles about Philip Treacy and his block-carver, Lorenzo Re, using sparterie in his block-conceptualizing process. If Philip Treacy is commissioning hatblocks from his own hand-formed sparterie sculptures, he must have a modern source, perhaps making it just for the high-end couture market. He's not using 50-year-old sheets of willow.
I'm not Philip Treacy though, so that's exactly what i'm doing.
When i first took the crafts artisan job at PlayMakers, i went through all the supplies in every drawer and cabinet and nook and cranny, taking stock of what i had to determine an initial inventory. In the course of that stocktaking, i discovered an amazing treasure-trove: four sheets of vintage willow in pristine condition.
The way it felt to find them, well, i think i have a tiny glimmer of an idea how Howard Carter's excavation team felt when they found that first step leading down to King Tut's tomb.
"Holy crap, this is it!"
I knew the minute i saw it what it was, the minute i touched it, despite having only read about it in millinery texts: esparterie.
For the past five years i have hoarded it, providing my millinery students with tiny 1" samples as part of our media swatch cards, and once allowing one student to cut a tiny sideband for a miniature burlesque top hat from half of one sheet. I've been waiting for the right show, in the right time period, with the right costume designer, someone who'd design a willow-appropriate hat for a performer i could trust to wear such a thing with care.
It's like some string of portents in a sword-and-sorcery novel: that time has come.
This is that show, and our designer, Anne Kennedy, is someone I've got a very good communicative rapport with, and for whom i've made many interesting hats. Lady Bracknell is to be played by PRC company actor Ray Dooley, a consummate professional who treats his hats with respect and care.
Today, I began the process of working with willow.
So, Lady Bracknell has two hats, one of which is a small tilted-brim Eugenie hat modeled on a derby crown shape, and the other a wide assymetrical-brim confection with a pinch crown and a pile of feathers. Both will be blocked in wool felt, eventually. But to block a hat, you need a hat block, yes?
It's no problem for me to block the crowns of these hats. I've got a great new pinch crown block i'm itching to break in, and a small 21" dome block will serve for the Derby-Eugenie. But the brims, that's another story. I could carve them from blue foam, like i did the Rich Lady hyperboloid-crown bonnet from Nicholas Nickleby...but blue foam has to be cut up and stacked up and glued and carved, and these brim shapes could be done easier and quicker using a sparterie block.
There's some great information on making brims and brim blocks in Denise Dreher's book From the Neck Up, and also in Jane Loewen's 1925 text, Millinery. I pored over them, planned out my shapes, and set to work.
( Images of shaping willow for the Derby-Eugenie )
