labricoleuse | Projects: Hats from straw, felt, leather, and willow

The last unit in my millinery class covered materials from which hats can be made other than buckram: straw, felt, leather, and willow. After a general overview about these materials and the different ways in which milliners can work with them, the students chose one type of material from which to execute a hat.

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telescoped sedge bonnet by Grier Coleman

This hat was made using spiral straw braid. Grier found two mass-manufatured straw hats and unspiraled them to create this piece. The hat features vintage molded-plastic floral garnitures and a band of wide coarse-weave yellow belting, trimmed in bias yellow gingham. The hat has a kinetic element--when worn, the telescoped portion sways around depending on how the wearer's head moves.

leather tricorne by Emily Mason

Emily was inspired by the iconic leather tricorne worn by Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean films. This hat is made from oil-tanned brown leather. Emily distressed the hat to look battered and worn using a rougher, sanding blocks, paint/dye, and by submerging it in water.

felt and velvet hat by Amanda Phillips

This sweet 1930s design (from a period rendering) has a tucked and blocked felt crown and a velvet brim trimmed in brown piping. Amanda used a combination of two felt hats from our stock which she reblocked and reworked to create this piece.

fulled miniature derby by Spencer Henderson

This hat was ultimately a failed experiment in fulling a felt hood, but i love how it turned out anyhow. Spencer knit the hat on a circular knitting frame and the fulled it with agitation and temperature shock in a washing machine. Spencer first knitted and fulled a sample square and tested shrinkage in both directions, then mathematically figured what he thought would be a large enough hat to shrink down to a 23" felt hood, which he planned to block into a cloche shape. Instead, it shrank far more than expected, resulting in this funny little cap. I like to think of it as the Simon Adebisi clown-hat.

ribbon-embroided straw garden hat by Jacki Blakeney

ribbon detail/side view

Jacki also unspiraled an extant straw braid hat to create this lovely sun-hat, inspired by research images from the 1920s. Note how she overlapped the braid more in the back to alter the width of the brim! Jacki plans to continue the ribbon embroidery with more flower shapes scattered down across the brim.

miniature burlesque top hat by Daniel Weger

Daniel was interested in the idea of the top hat reimagined as ladies cocktail attire. He took inspiration from the tiny top hats worn by burlesque performers such as in the film Moulin Rouge, and one worn by Winona Ryder's character in Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. Daniel was also drawn to the exceedingly rare opportunity to work with willow, a millinery material no longer produced, but which was historically used to create the extreme swooping lines of these concave-cylindrical hat crowns. I'd found four sheets of willow on top of a filing cabinet when i took this job and was initially going through the shop inventory, a portion of one of which Daniel used to create the sideband of this hat. Willow is a two-layer material, composed of a layer of loosely-woven strips of wood bonded to a layer of crinoline with a starchy adhesive. When wet, it can be shaped into extreme curves, and when dry it hardens to a durable stiffness.