A review on Vintage Vogue V7464, hat B

This review is solely for hat B, not any of the other hats you get when you purchase this pattern. I have not tried to make the other hats and have no idea if the instructions for them are good or bad.

Before I started this hat I had heard a lot on how bad the instructions were for it. I decided to give it a try anyway, as it is a cool hat. Unfortunately every bad thing I have heard proved to be true. The instruction for this hat is the worst I have ever encountered. For a start, the black and white drawing seems to be of a completely different hat. You get no help for figuring the pattern out by looking at that, so don’t. There are two nice photos of the finished hat, but they are both from the front. As the hat is asymmetrical it would have helped if there had been a back view as well.





The pattern pieces could have used better markings of what is front and back. It’s not clear from the beginning what is what, which makes a confusing pattern even more confusing. It’s also unclear at times to where you should attach various pattern pieces to each other.

The instructions are scant to say the least. I read them carefully before I started as well as several times when working with the hat and had to mull over every step carefully. Especially since some steps are all but left out and only by looking at the drawings and the photos did I manage to put it together. I still made a mistake that I didn’t realize was a mistake until much further on, as the instructions gave no clue to what was right and I tried to do what the drawing looked like- which was wrong.

The buckram piece is much too large for the hat and needs to be cut down. There are, however, no instructions on how much. A bit nit-picky, I admit, is that you are instructed to shape the buckram over a Styrofoam ball. That is, of course, an excellent suggestion if you don’t have a hat stock (and not many has), but I would have liked at least a mention of a hat stock.

Finally, the last necessary steps for finishing the hat are completely left out. After following all the instructions I was left with a hat that looked like this from the front:



Back:



Not much like the original and that is because you need to do a final step to finish it and given the shape of the hat, that step wasn’t exactly easy to spot. It took me some time to figure it out and now the hat is finally done! As I have photographed every step I took when making this hat, there will be an additional post on how I put the hat together- hopefully that can be of help to someone else.

The conclusion is that the pattern is quite bad and I can’t really recommend it. However, if you are ready to improvise and accept that the hat you make get touches that you don’t find in the original hat, then it IS a pretty cool hat, after all, which I guess is why people wants to make it.. It’s definitely not a beginner’s pattern. I’m quite sure that I will never use it again. I should add that I have used Vintage Vogue patterns several times and always found the instructions good, so I’m quite surprised over the particular instructions for this hat.