An American Duchess Brain Hat

Or as I like to call it - a jellyfish explosion in a boudoir factory.

 

One needs lots of hats. You can't fight it - it's just a fact of life. This one's supposed to be a  bergere with loops and puffs of silk gauze all over the crown, a la the "Brain Hat" from the American Duchess Guide to 18th Century Dressmaking. (page 153)

I began by covering a straw hat blank with silk taffeta:

I traced the shape of the hat brim onto purple silk taffeta, leaving about an inch of seam allowance at the edges.  I cut roughly out a hole for the crown, then stitched the silk down at the outer edge of the brim, smoothing and folding the seam allowance over to the underside of the hat. After that, I sewed the silk to the inner edge of the brim, tight against the crown of the hat. 

 
Next, I covered the crown with a square of purple silk taffeta, smoothed and pinned my way around and over the edge of the crown.

 

I stitched the silk down tightly against the base of the crown and cut away the excess.  Because the hat will be covered in billows of silk gauze, you don't need to make a clean finish here. You won't see it.

Next, I covered the underside of the hat. I've described how I line the underside of a hat brim in a previous post here. The procedure is the same - except that in this case when you bind the brim you can either use the silk you used for the top side of the hat, or you can choose a ribbon to match or contrast with your color scheme.

 

The thing about lining hats is - it hurts.

Once the hat was lined, I had to trim it. I use the words "had to," because I ran into technical difficulties almost immediately. 

I'd  planned to make my 'brain' out of a rather elegant gold-striped silk gauze, but the gauze fabric was lousy.  

 I'd purchased the fabric from a highly-regarded retailer who had previously sold me wonderful fabrics, but this particular gauze arrived as a loose, irregular weave, woven from a stiff, coarse thread and the raw edges of this fabric didn't fray - they splintered, shattering open when I cut the stuff, or lifted the stuff, or touched it, or, cross my heart,even looked at it sideways from underneath my eyelashes.  Commercial fray-check products didn't help at all -the threads of the weave were so far apart that it was like dabbing glue onto the end of a broom, and it was just about as useful. 

For the ruffle along the edge of the brim, a conventional hem was clearly right out of the question - when you put a needle through the horrible stuff, the thread dragged out channels and drove puckers into the cloth. 
Eventually I worked out I could press - carefully - a half-inch fold without losing more than 1/4 or 3/8 of an inch to the shattering problem, and I could hold it - carefully - in place with a running stitch.  If you didn't look too close.

For the brain I reckoned I'd have less trouble - puddling on a pile of the stuff would hide the fraying edges beneath the puddle, and despite the looseness of the weave, the gauze was so crisp that it would - surely - stand up in lovely folds and puffs!
And it did.  Unfortunately, there was one more little problem: the weave of that damn gauze was so loose that my pinhead were sliding right through - even my biggest clover quilting pins were passing through like hot steel through a blob of butter, and pretty soon I  had a high balloon of gauze with pins stuck to a straw shell underneath it, and  naturally,  working a pin back out wasn't half as effortless as watching it slight right in!

At this point I felt committed beyond point of return (please don’t argue here about the economy of sunk costs.  By now I wasn't a rational actor in any way, form or shape - so I pinned and I stitched (and don't ask how the stuff handled the stitching either, thank you) and I pinned, and I pinned and I stitched, and I stitched, and wherever the stitching really wouldn't hold I stuck a pink bow, 

 

- and then because I didn't even want to look at that horrible gauze anymore I abandoned the ruffle and bound the hat in a gold satin ribbon, and when I sat up to take a breath, it looked GOOD.

And you'd think that would be the end of it, wouldn't you?

I went away and did something else for a day or two, and felt pretty good about the whole thing, really I did, but then I came back to the hat to stitch a pair of ribbon ties to the underside, and I found that that bloody BLOODY gauze had slipped its stitching in several places and was popping up where it shouldn't be popping, so I had to sit down again and stitch it down again, and when I sat up again, the stupid bloody brain was held down all right, but there was absolutely almost no froof left in it whatsoever.  All my big billows and puffs had been deflated into something that looked a something like a collapsed pudding and something like a big gauze cowpat.

 

At this point there was absolutely no enthusiasm left in ME whatsoever either.
 

Even worse, my puffy pink bows stood out like a bouquet of sore pink thumbs.  I bound the brim edge with pink ribbon layered over the gold, to tie it all together, but now that hat looked like a freaking melted Neapolitan ice-cream.

It was NOT a good moment.

I walked away again for another day or two.  And then I was done.  I stuck that stupid wonky ruffle onto the edge of the hat so that it looked more like a deliberate sort of mess and less like a flat pudding on a purple plate -

 

And then I got dressed up and took photographs to tell it that I hadn't been beaten. I had WON. And whenever it slips another stitch or shreds at me I can pull out those photographs, wave them at it, and it will KNOW that I did.

Amen.

A Bergere Hat with Ribbons On: A Tutorial for a Trimmed Hat.

Here's the short version: 

I fell in love with a painting.
I bought several yards of watered acetate ribbon.
I bought a straw hat blank.
I bled a bit.
And then I fell in love.

 

A bergere hat is a flat-brimmed hat with a shallow crown.  They started to show up in the second quarter of the 18th century, and as the wide flat brims balanced the wide panniered skirts of the 18th century, they stayed popular until skirt widths  began to collapse again in the 1790s.  Earlier hats were decorated quite simply:

 

Hat, British c. 1760 via the Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

but as fashion styles grew more complex, they literally BALLOONED.

 

Cabinet des Modes ou les Modes Nouvelles, 1 Novembre 1786, pl. III

 

And some of them are simply, quietly, elegantly beautiful.

 

The Nabob's Return by Nathanial Dance c. 1769 via National Gallery of Victoria

Tacking ribbons to a straw hat is not particular difficult. However, I wanted this bergere to be lined, so that the straw blank wouldn't catch on my hair or on the fine, delicate fabric of fine delicate caps.

 

Sewing the Lining:
I began by pinning a piece of silk taffeta into the crown of the hat, and then pinning until the silk was more or less caught more or less neatly against the straw shell of the hat. And then I stitched.  

Note: the photos of the lining being sewn are from a different hat with a covered top.  This is why you're seeing an intimidating number of pins sticking through from the other side. (Yes, there was blood. Just a splash. But it got the job done.)

To cover the underside of the brim, I traced the outline of the hat on another piece of silk taffeta, and cut myself a circle of roughly the same size.  I laid the silk onto the underside of the brim, pinned it into place and stitched down the outer edge.  The stitching line is hidden by a bound ribbon, so you can hand-sew or use a machine -  whichever feels more comfortable.  Once the outer brim is caught, pin it securely about an inch and a half away from the inner edge of the brim and cut through into the open center.  Cut the excess away, leaving an inch or so of seam allowance, and then bit by bit, fold the raw edge under.  Once you have MORE pins in place, stitch down your edge with whip or catch stitches (whichever bleeds less.)

Binding the brim: 

Take your binding ribbon and begin to fold it around the edge of your hat brim, holding it in place with pins or clips.  I personally love quilting clips for this job  - they grip nicely without marking the fabric.  Begin tacking down the ribbon with small stab stitches - if you've balanced the ribbon over the top and bottom edges, you can catch both sides of it at once.  Sew your way slowly around the edge of the hat brim, catching the small gathers in your stitches as you sew around the curve.

And now you can trim your hat!
Work slowly - take your time deciding where you want your ribbon placement - do you want tight puffs? Loose puffs? Large ones? Small ones? One row? Two?  Bows? Do you have a very soft silk ribbon?  A crisper taffeta one?

I trimmed this particular bergere with two rows of ribbon puffs - one stitched down at the base of the crown, and one half an inch or so further up.  Let the ribbon show you how it wants to fall, and you'll find that it is doing more than half the work for you. 

 

 Play with the ribbons, stock up on bandaids, and at the end of it all, you'll have a beautifully lined, beautifully trimmed confection!

Two Christmas Bergere Hats

Can I make a pair of bergere hats out of Christmas placemats and decorations from the dollar store?

I've wanted to try making an 18th Century bergere from a placemat for a while now, and when I saw a selection of silly Christmas mats in the local Jumbo supermarket, it felt like the right time to try.

I bought some Christmas- colored ribbons in a cordoneria downtown, and made a trip to the Best Mart dollar store to see what sort of Christmas froof I could find for decorations, came home and dug out my spool of millinery wire - and I was ready to go.

The placemats are VERY floppy, so I started by sewing two circles of millinery wire onto each placemat - one circle about an inch in from the edge, to give structure to the brim, and another circle about 2.25 inches in radius around the center, to stiffen the "crown" of the hat.

 

IMPORTANT NOTE HERE: When sewing millinery wire by machine, you need to be wearing proper eye protection.  Millinery wire is solid metal, sewing machine needles move swiftly and safety goggles are cheap in any hardware store.  Even sewing slowly and deliberately, the needle can snap - and when it does it will happen faster than you think.

 

I set the sewing machine to a zig-zag stitch, of about medium width and about medium stitch length, and I stitched at a slow and deliberate pace - I wanted a zig-zag that would be short and narrow enough to hold the wire securely, but also wide enough that I didn't have to risk the needle hitting the wire on every stitch.
When I came to the end of my circle I kept going and overlapped the wire by about 2 inches to keep the circle circular - and then I cut the wire free with a pair of wire cutters.

I trimmed the hats with my ribbon, using the pleating to hide the wires. 

The red ribbon was pleated in a box pleat, which sprang up in lovely puffs.

The gold ribbon I pleated in wide knife pleats.

I didn't worry about measuring the pleats, I just eyeballed them to keep them relatively even, and let the small variations between the pleats give a happy organic feel to the hat.

 

Once I had the ribbons sewn down, I tacked on dollar store Christmas-y corsages and other wintery floral bits until the hats looked pleasantly tasteless and festive. 

 

Lastly, I cut ribbon ties about 24 inches long and hemmed the ends so that they didn't unravel.  Then I flipped the hats over and sewed on ribbon ties. On these crown-less hats, you need to sew the ties about 2 inches out from the crown line, or you risk looking like a festive pageant pancake.
(See warning photo below)

The red hat is suitable for the 1750s and early 1760s when a single sprig of ornamentation, discreetly placed, was VERY chic

The gold hat is suitable for the 1770s and 1780s, when they wore the entire kitchen sink.

Bold, Brassy, Cool and Classy -  two fabulous Christmas Bergere Hats!