Day 7

  I apologize this time for the lack of photos.  There will be some coming, I'm just in a little bit of a hurry this morning because I want to get in early enough to shop for fabric at the nearby fabric stores.  In other, non-hat news, a friend of ours was in town and the three of us went last night to see Wicked, which was awesome.  We really enjoyed it, and there was the bonus (for me) of a lot of hats.  And fancy hats too!

  So, Day 7.  We worked most of the day on our parasisals.  Mine is going to be a cloche, which is one of my favorite styles.  For those of you who are about to open another tab for the googling, a cloche is a 20's style hat with a short brim that fits closely to the head. Cloche means "bell" in French to give you some idea of the shape.  I picked a crown block that has these swooping dips in it...I will have to get you a picture, it will be easier.  There wasn't really a good block for the brim, so I picked one that was about the right shape and I had to cut it so that it would do what I wanted.  This proved challenging since, once I pinned the cap to the brim, it went about down to my chin when I tried it on.  It makes it hard to figure out where to cut it.

  I did though, and I've got the brim wired and rolled (but not yet stitched.  I'm pretty excited about it now, though it was hard to see how it was going to ever come out well while I was snipping at the brim.  I'm not sure if I'll have a chance to finish it today, though, as we're going to be doing some work on a draped fabric hat.  If you're having trouble picturing that (I am), think turban.  I don't really want a turban, though, so I'm doing a draped cocktail hat...turban conjures visions of dramatic women in flowing silk robes with cigarette holders and dark red lipstick for some reason.

  We picked out some blocks yesterday and blocked on some buckram, a sort of meshy fabric that comes pre-infused with tons of stiffiner.  This makes it a very sticky mess to work with.  All of my blocking pins were sticking to my fingers, and my thimble got stuck onto my thumb.  But, it was kind of fun.  I've just come to really hate the vintage blocks because you almost need a hammer and nails to get anything into (no, that's not what I'm doing, I'm trying very hard to push little pins into them, bending half in the process).  I'm going to be free cutting this one a little bit too, but it should be a little more straight forward.