a little brown hat - part 1

 

A little brown hat:

Felt is a lovely fabric to work with; it does not fray, it can be stretched a little and shrunk quite a lot, with the aid of a bit of steam, and it has a warmth to it that I really like, especially for hats and bags.

The hat in question is a pattern I got from Mrs Depew (Etsy) although I have seen it since in other places.

My first consideration with hats is which side is my hair parted, unless the hat is symmetrical, ie both sides the same, it can make a big difference and I have made a couple of errors when working this out only to find I have a hat that is angled the wrong way.  The problem often arises from the fact that I look at the hat with it facing me and I when I look at myself with the aid of a mirror I am also facing me, but the two are not the same.  My reflection is obviously a mirror image and my parting is on the opposite side in real life. If I forget this momentarily I can, and have, cut a hat to sit on my mirror image head not my real one.

The parting on the picture of lady wearing this hat is on her left and I part my hair on the right so I knew I would need to reverse the brim on this one.

 I also decided to line the hat, this can sometimes save your hair a little when you take the hat off, slides off instead of sticking and pulling your hair out of style.  I picked some vibrant burnt orange satin to make the lining left over from I can’t remember what.  I do tend to keep leftovers of a reasonable size to line bags and hats as you really don’t need much and they can always be a mixture of different colours as no one actually see them, in this case though I only used one colour as I had enough of it, and there should still be enough for the bag too. Obviously if I’m making for someone else the whole lot matches, I’m just a little more thrifty when it comes to my own things.

Trimming the interfacing close to the seam,

I also choose sew-in interfacing rather than iron on, so there would be no chance of it starting to wrinkle.

Close up of edge stitching on right side 

and on wrong side

The gathering ready to be streamed

The instructions were fairly straightforward and I followed exactly the same procedure for the lining, the only difference being when combining them together.  I folded up the lining along the hem line and ironed if down, then I pinned it inside the hat before running the gathering stitch around both.   Now I have some steaming to do to finish the process before sewing the hat-band on. All that will have to wait though ... will have a finished hat for you next week.

Ally x