felt hat | Teri Berry Textiles

I started this hat a couple of weeks ago but when I went to add some textile foil onto the “flames” I found only sliver, green and red foil in the cupboard, but really wanted gold for this hat. I placed an order and it arrived on Saturday.

When applying textile foil I normally use textile glue and fix the foil with an iron but the curly shapes of the flames made this very awkward so I resorted to waiting for the glue to dry naturally before removing the backing plastic.

Here it is covered in foil strips waiting for the glue to dry:

A close up of the foiling, I think you can see that there is a mixture of red and gold foil:

The finished hat from different views:

For those of you reading by email, this is the link to the web page: blog post

Over on the Felting and Fiber Forum, Judith (AKA Koffipot) very kindly compared my chain and flame hats to David Schilling’s creations. I confess I had never heard of him before this discussion, although I did recognise some of his Royal hats, I thought one of them might have been princess Beatrice’s “toilet seat hat” as Ann so aptly described it 🙂 but it turns out that this is a Philip Treacy hat.

Looking through a gallery of his work I started to wonder if some of the shapes could be realised in seamless felt….? Looking at his hats has sparked a few ideas that I hope to realise in felt.

One of them looked like a gift-wrapped box and I wondered if I could make a small stack of felt boxes set at jaunty angles. This is the block for the base of the stack and a test run to see if I could make a felt box stiff enough to keep its shape when worn:

Keeping with the resist theme, this hat used the book style resist I wrote about last week.

Adding some hand-dyed cotton:

I have also been doing some home work for the dressmaking course I started a couple of weeks ago, but I’m afraid I made a boob… cutting the last panel for my dress I forgot to flip the pattern piece to get a mirror image and didn’t realise until I had cut the piece out. Now I don’t have enough fabric to complete the dress so I will have to make some more 🙁 But I need to make some felt for Ruth’s screen printing course so I will just make a job lot 🙂

This is the dress I will be making (no changing my mind now if it doesn’t work!):

The white will create the centre panels with the blue forming the panels down the sides.

I also made a start on the prep work for Ruth’s experimental screen printing class that started yesterday, I have made 2 screens, 1 large and a smaller square one.