2nd Millinery Course - Week 9

This week we started to have our individual tutorials. I printed off all my diary posts and added in some of the pictures of my research (not nearly enough it seems) along with the other bits I’ve done – spider diagrams, word association, analysis of individual pictures. Then I stuck it all in a folder, loaded up myself with bags of hats (I genuinely hadn’t realised how much I’d produced on the course so far) and proceeded to almost get it all to Fulham Broadway in one piece (a very nasty man tried to squeeze past me, squashed everything and then yelled at me)

I’d brought a hood with me to try some manipulation. First I blocked it on a rounded dome block, pulling it right down to the bottom. Then I released it, lifted it up a little and introduced a fold around the crown. I was going to do more, but I loved the simplicity of it so I pinned that in place and got to work on the brim.

I steamed the brim heavily then started to play with it to try all sorts of shapes. Eventually I settled on having it up on one side and down on the other, with an additional flick down at the top to keep it the right height. I steamed and stretched and compressed all over the place to make it look right and left it in the oven to dry. When it came out it looked like I hadn’t done all the steaming and stretching though – it was wrinkled up again!!!

While I was doing all that, I made up some bias binding in sinamay and started to bind the edge of my headpiece. I was surprised how easily the sinamay was worked around quite tight curves and how smart it looks as it's done.

I had my tutorial right at the end of the evening. The teacher seemed to like my folder, but expected far more photos and pictures and didn’t really look at the rest of the stuff I’d done. I guess I’m taking the wrong approach with my research, but the last time I did a project like this was at school so I know I’m a bit rusty. Oh well, I’ll try to go in a slightly different direction with it from now on.

PHOTOS TO FOLLOW - I'VE BROKEN MY COMPUTER AT HOME SO I'M GETTING A BIT BEHIND WITH THEM