Day 9

The stitched up fabric hat (I'm  playing around with the veiling)
and there are two people working in the back, not Mickey Mouse ears...

  Day 9 started with a somewhat spontaneous fabric purchase.  For some reason, no matter when I try to leave, I always end up being about 20 minutes early, which is a little too much.  The bus occasionally ends a little bit early and stops one stop before my usual one, and right in front of that is a fabric shop with lots of "wax" which is one of the fabrics they use in Senegal.  They didn't have a lot of really cool patterns (I should have gotten the chicken and egg fabric when I had a chance), but it was really well priced.  They had pre-cut 5 meter pieces for 10 pounds.  So I bought one of those and got two yards of not real wax because I liked the pattern.

  In class we worked some more on our fabric hats.  I carefully pinned mine into a pattern that I liked, using quite a lot of pins, which caused a lot of pain when it came to stitching it in.  Basically you have to try to invisibly sew your pleats down while having them stay put and lay right.  I was able to cheat a little bit because of my sequiny fabric (I hid some stitches underneath the sequins, shh, don't tell).  If I had picked something satiny, I would have had a lot harder time of it.  Nonetheless, it was slow work, a lot of which had to do with all of the pins sticking out of it.

  Once I got the top part stitched down and trimmed, I cut out some fuchsia pink silk for the lining, and its pieces together, which was surprisingly tricky.  I had it done before the end of the class and tried it in the hat...at which point I found that you could see through the silk.  And to all of the ugly black stitches I wasn't worried about because they were going to be covered.  I have a plan that might work.

  Today we're blocking another little felt hat, pretty much whatever we want.  While that dries I'll be fixing my fabric hat.  I'm a little sad about the last day of class :(