Well, it's not as insane as you might think. I found an excellent tutorial at americanduchess.blogspot.com on how to make structured hats. I didn't follow the directions exactly, but when I saw some needlepoint plastic (which as I reread the tutorial I see might have worked better as canvas - whoops!) while out shopping for petticote fabric, I knew I had to make some sort of silly hat for myself. I couldn't have done this without the tutorial - thanks, Ms. Reeser!
And here's the haberdashical inspiration:
(That's two inspirations stacked on top of each other, on top of a harpsichord.)
The side and front views
Back and front
And more from the front. Pardon the awful image quality, the only images I could find were screen captures from low-quality YouTube videos.
This hat design will never cease to make me giggle whenever I see it. For those not as geeky as I am, that's Don Basilio (and "Don Alonso") in the Met Opera's latest production of Il Barbiere di Siviglia. Hence, this hat will be referred to as 'the Basilietta,' literally a 'little, feminine Basilio' (or 'little Basilia,' if you want to be technical.)
After messing around with the needlepoint plastic for a while, I caved in to opera geekery and the fact that I couldn't think of any other type of hat to make. Really, this hat is so huge that it leaves no room for other ideas inside one's head - and so wide that the actors had trouble fitting through the doors on-stage. (I love that production of Barbiere! Ha!)
I intend to scale down the brim a bit and make it not out of felt, but a nice, thick, grainy-type satin or silk and add plumes, ribbons, pins, etc. That way I can pass it off for a respectable ladies' hat at any costumial gatherings I may attend, while giggling to myself about the idea behind it all. Also, I've got some friends who might appreciate the epic win of this hat -- or the equally epic weird. Either or, I still love the idea.
My production of the hat:
I started off with two sheets of needlepoint plastic, some sheets of felt a friend had given me when she cleaned out her old house about a year ago, some leftover fabric from one of my mother's sewing projects (she uses patterns - pah!), and a bunch of 20-gauge wire.
I cut a roughly head-shaped circle in the center of a sheet of the plastic, and cut felt to the size of the circle and the remaining plastic, which would become the brim. After threading numerous lengths of the 20-gauge wire lengthwise through the edges of the hat that were to be curled upward -- and destroying my fingertips in the process -- I stitched the first piece of felt to the circular piece and gave the brim a little test-curl.
All the materials, sewn crown, wired and curled brim.
Just the stitched crown and wired & curled brim, with a barely-readable ruler for size comparison. (No, my skull isn't octagon-shaped. I fixed that later.)
At this point, I realize that after the hat's covered in felt and fabric and stuck on my head somehow, there's no way that the brim-curling will stay put with measly 20-gauge. While I anxiously await the morning, work, and the after-work wire hunt, I get the rest of the felt on the brim and all ready to stick a bunch of wires into. It's starting to look something like a hat now, which is awesome. Oh, and I got the band together (knew I was missing something) using part of the second sheet of needlepoint plastic and a bit of incongruous scrap yarn.
A trip to the local hardware store and a bit more fingertip-destruction later, I've got some 16-gauge wire to run between the felt and the plastic, and stitch securely to my brim. Those curls ain't goin' nowheres.
Now there's just the problem of the wires poking out from inside the felt whenever I test out curling the edges a little, but that's easily fixed by stitching little folded squares of felt over the corners, where the wires could pop out of either end of the brim.
So, after getting the wires in and covering the whole thing with felt, this hodgepodge is starting to appear distinctly hat-like in form. Yay!
None of it's stitched together yet; that'll come after I cover the whole thing in fabric. Then we get to the tricky part: attaching the crown and band to the brim (and making that whole transition appear seamless.) (Har, har.)
To be continued -- once I finish getting this petticote together! I tend to take photos of a project and then wait a week or two to post a blog entry about it, so by the time I'm done posting about something I'm ready to take a break from it and work on a different project for a while. But I promise (to myself more than anyone else, as I doubt this blog's been seen by really anyone at this point) that this hat will be finished -- and hopefully before the New Year!
No comments:
Post a Comment