A Tropical-weight Christmas Ensemble

Late December in summer, in the tropics, in the worlds driest desert, is not really the sort of time or place where one wants to put on stays and stockings and chemises and petticoats. A swimsuit feels more appropriate.

But I pulled out my linen-iest 1750s ensemble, and put on my Christmas mitts and my Christmas hat and went down to the beach!

A placemat is a good budget option for a bergere, but doesn't have any crown. It isn't going to sit on the head like a hat with a crown, and for these earlier decades of the 18th century, where there weren't masses of hair to cushion one's headwear, the difference will be noticeable.

 

But if you're wanting a quick and easy seasonal hat that looks brilliant from 100 paces and still pretty all-right up close, a a placemat is FUN!

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!

The Cracktastic Hat Bounces BACK

 

My little halloween-y hat, last seen looking like something Maria Shriver Schwarzenegger's bridesmaids would have worn, languished for a year, stripped and undressed.
Over this past weekend, I picked it out of my 'To DO, you great Procrastinator, you!' pile, and redecorated.
            Black feathers, ribbons, a spider-brooch with the brooch-ery stripped off, and voila!
It's still reasonably cracktastic: I'd thick-headedly attached the original decorations with hot-glue, and this time around had to use enough froof-ery to cover the hot-glue scars, but if you can't go bonkers with the frou-frou on Halloween, when can you?
            This little hat does not exist within a vaccum - it belongs to a halloween-colored outfit that I completed just before the move.
            Consider these photos to be in the nature of a teaser - complete outfit coming soon!

A Brown hat

She doesn't smoke cigarettes or rub burned cork on her eyelids, but she's about two steps away from rolling up her stockings and rouging her knees.... or she would be if I knew how to get rouge out of vinyl.
Being a fashionable dolly only goes so far.

The pattern for this little number came from a now-apparently-and-tragically-defunct doll hat company called Cathy Stuart Designs.
            (Ignore the Silver Robe Francaise that she's wearing. She lives in a state of temporal and existential confusion. What can I say? She's a doll. She spends most of her life with sewing pins stuck into her torso. That'd unhinge anybody.)

 

 

I made two of their hats - this one and a lovely Gainsborough, and then the company's phone was disconnected and my mail-orders were returned to sender.
A pity- they designed great hats!

From the Archives - A hat for AG Felicity's Meet Outfit

Here's the other half of the straw purse used to make Bella's lovely ribbon-wreathed hat!
            I know that the ribbons aren't supposed to cross over the top of the hat, but they look so sweet...

The Butterick Bonnet - that ALMOST was.

Last year I used Butterick Pattern #4210 to make an American Girl scale 1860s bonnet.
Mr Tabubil scanned the pattern pieces at work, and I imported them into autocad and traced and scaled them down to AG doll size.

I wish to go on record as saying that I loathe this pattern; several of the pieces didn't fit and had to be totally re-drafted.  That's ridiculous.
I sewed it from buckram, mulled it with flannel and covered it with pink silk duponi and white silk satin.  I don't like using glue (as per the pattern instructions) so I sewed it completely by hand - and something about the way this pattern held together - or didn't hold together - has made it take FOREVER to assemble.
And worse, all those hours down the track, I found that I'd forgotten to account for the mulling or the lining  - and the darned hat, at the end of all, doesn't actually fit the doll.

It was intended to be worn with Bella, but I can't seem to summon the enthusiasm to finish it.

Bah.

The Straw Basket Bonnet: Version Two

A couple of years ago I split a small straw craft-store hat in half, lined it in cotton, and covered it with some wired gift-ribbon left over from Christmas celebrations, and tacked a row of pleated orange ribbon to the edge of the brim.  And did nothing else with it whatsoever except stick it in the back of my parents closet.

After the fiasco of the Halloween hat, this bonnet came to mind as a suitable vehicle for my orange roses - they're made of the same orange ribbon as the trim on this bonnet.
At Christmas I collected the bonnet from my parents place and last week, I buckled down and finished trimming it.

I had no more of the ribbon I'd used to cover the base, so to make the curtain - or whatever the technical term is for the fiddly bit at the back of the bonnet that kept Victorian ladies' necks modest - I went to Sckafs Fabrics in Indroopilly and found something that more or less matched.

I spent a little time playing and thinking up a design for the flowered trim:

To coordinate with my new bonnet, I dug into the stash and pulled out a much-loved and never-used remnant of sunset-colored rayon chiffon, and while I was still in my happy hemming place, hand rolled a hem around the edges for a matching shawl.

This is a historical piece and we're just going to pretend that synthetic dye technology was a few decades in advance of reality, okay?

I added a pair of orange ribbon ties:

And - voila! One entirely passable 1860's bonnet!  In technicolor.

The Straw Basket Bonnet

How to make an 1860's doll bonnet from a craft-store straw basket:

Take one small straw basket from Lincraft. (Home furnishings section)
Slice in half, bind the raw edge with cotton bias, line the shell with silk taffeta and lace, attach a silk curtain round the bottom edge, and go wild with feather biots and fabric flowers and white taffeta!

The Inadvertent Hat of Cracktastic 80s Wedding Fabulousness

Late last night as I finished sewing the orange ribbon roses for this hat I had one of those moments of horrible realization - my little 1860s doll hat: intended to be all Halloween-y and macabre-like, had turned into a wedding headband - from 1986.
            Out of a special wedding double-episode of a daytime soap opera, where the groom wears a dove-gray tuxedo with a pink cummerbund, and the whole bridal party is high on hairspray and coughing up opalescent glitter.
              This hat is the perfect accompaniment to the sort of tulle-and-sequin explosion that they used to design specifically for thrift store windows.
            You know what I'm talking about -  all brassy plastic pearls and and white illusion netting and monstrous puffed shoulders, with a matching beaded tiara sagging dismally from the neck of the coat hanger, and the whole ensemble getting dustier and sadder every year, as its swags of spiky plastic lace turn yellow in the sunlight and brush the dust away from the racks of clip-on earrings that just make the window display, don't you think?
            The orange hat-band and the orange gauze streamers and the beaded wire sprays and the ostrich feather- they've all got to go.  I'll keep the roses and the feather spear and go out and find some black ribbons.  And a spider.  Possibly a mouse skull, what do you think?