A tutorial for a 40's style tilt hat

About this hat
I made the hat without a precise plan to where I was heeding and it wasn't until I was halfway done that it dawned on me that others might find the process interesting. That's the reason to why there aren't many pictures from the early stages and you have to make do with some me-made drawings. The hat is not a copy of an existing hat, but rather draws on numerous pictures of tilt hats as inspiration. I don't claim any historical authenticity at all.

Consider this tutorial as more of a template for making a tilt hat of your choice rather than for one specific design. That is why there aren't any exact measurement and often more than one suggestion to how to treat a certain step. I hope I will manage to explain clearly what I mean, but if there is something that seems unclear, please ask! It is surprisingly difficult to write tutorials, so I hope I have managed to write something that is understandable. Hat making is surrounded by an air of mystique, but making hat is actually not hard at all. Being, by it's very nature, a rather small project, making it doesn't take long and if you make a mistake you don't loose so much if you have to start all over again.

Supplies
1 hat capeline/hood in felt.
Millinery wire
Sharp needles
Thread
Grosgrain/Petersham ribbon
Optional: Extra decoration of your choice.

A review of the Parfait dress, Colette Patterns #1003

After the wedding, which despite being small still took a lot of time to prepare and some stress, we both got a cold. That is, J got a cold and I got what I for a few days feared was the return of pneumonia. Turned out it was "just" a severe case of bronchitis and I was ordered complete rest. As in "not even emptying the dishwasher"-rest. I spent a few exceedingly boring days on my back, but thankfully I have now progressing to sitting in the sofa stage. And sitting up means that I can actually hand sew and I'm not quite as bored now. My inner puritan is having a merry time, though, telling me that I ought to be able to do a little, but I have been told off by all my near and dear to not listen. So I try not to and is now working through all the blog posts I have not read in a while, answering mails and sewing. I'm currently working on a brown hat that is turning out somewhat more extravagant than usual and I have finished a dress. Hence this review.

The Parfait dress is the second pattern I purchased from Colette Patterns. The first, the Jasmine blouse, is reviewed here

Source: colettepatterns.com via Elisa on Pinterest

We are all real

Notice my new widget. It is brought to you from Brittany at Va-Voom Vintage and can be found here. She wrote a post yesterday on a subject that has cropped up again and again in blogs for a while, on what is a “real” woman. There is Facebook memes and similar that totes that a curvy woman should somehow be better than, more real, than a skinny one. I can, sort of, see what this is coming from. We live in a society where media totes one body type, the very slim one, as the ideal. An ideal that many women just can’t live up to. Then it’s a bit a relief to look at Marilyn Monroe or Christina Hendricks or Nigella Lawson and say- Look, these women are bigger than the usual model and they are beautiful. I look at these women and think so. I love that there are blogs out there, like Brittany’s, written by women with bodies that are similar to mine. I really love that.

Dressing vintage, a sub-culture?

Lina Sofia made a comment on my post Properly Dressed? about dressing in a vintage style at a sociology institution where some people study the retro sub-culture. I have been thinking about this before, on and off, and her comment put it on again. Am I and you and you part of a sub-culture just because we opt to dress a certain way? To me a subculture have always been more than about the way you dress, even is fashion is a significant way off defining yourself to belonging to a certain way of life. It’s about sharing an outlook on life, setting yourself voluntarily apart from what is considered the norm in society. I have never felt that people interested in vintage are uniform enough to warrant the label sub-culture. I discussed the subject with Pimpinett who pointed out the diversity of what she calls “retrophiles” (which I think is a very good name, btw.) There are those involved with the burlesque scene, those who dance, living role-players, rockability and so on. All with different outlooks on how they define vintage and what they want from it.