my hat is bigger than your hat

Meet Lady Kytson:
 
Or at any rate, meet her hat. It’s quite a hat. Indeed, if you compare her to various other portraits, her face is much lower in the painting than average to accommodate that gloriously silly hat. After Julie started messing around with hat-making (and complaining about the largeness and silliness of the hats), I decided it was time to work on the hat I’ve been coveting. Also, I think I’ll have to start cultivating that “I smell something foul, perhaps it’s a peasant” facial expression. To use on my husband.

Step 1: Analyze the hat. The height of Lady Kytson’s hat is roughly 150% that of her face, tapers up to a bulbous sort of shape, and has an exceedingly arched brim. I’m not sure what the fabric might be, as it’s a black-on-black portrait, but I’m going on the assumption that the very nice cotton velvet that supposed to be arriving in my mailbox tomorrow would be a good choice. She’s got some sort of enormous bendy feather on the side, which I’ll have to look for. She’s also got a bunch of brooches? buttons? jewels? who knows? stuck all around the base of the crown. That too, I’ll have to consider. I may do a simple band, since my character isn’t supposed to be quite as hoity-toity as all that.

Step 2: Make a paper mockup on a small scale to see how the curves will come together. Decide that it’s the proper size for the dog. Chase the dog around with a paper hat and a camera. Always an important step in any sewing endeavor, right?

 
Step 3: Lay out a pattern. Definitely don’t bother to research the pattern, just start tinkering. Surely high school geometry is good for something. I am using plastic canvas because that’s readily available locally, whereas buckram is not. Also, while I do know how to make tacky Kleenex box covers, I do not know how to work with buckram. No doubt as I sweat under this enormous plastic hat, I’ll regret this decision, but there’s nothing new about that. Here’s what I ended up with for a pattern after a couple of tries:

 
Step 4: Stick a few stitches on each side to make sure that this hat is going to go together approximately right. And by approximately right, I mean that it should make the husband choke with laughter. Apparently, it was approximately right. I made the husband compare the portrait and me a number of times to see if the proportions were in the ballpark. After all his squinting and measuring with his fingers and all, he was unable to conclude that the hat was too big. If anything, he said, it might be a smidge small. Hard to believe I know. So then, here is the aptly-named “mock up.” You may commence mocking. On a side note, I can still walk through doorways, so that’s good.


 

Step 5: Take it apart and start sewing it together properly. No pictures of that yet, but it’s going along swimmingly. Plastic canvas is really fun to sew on. Oh, also, additional mocking at this point would be fair. As if that weren’t self-evident.