Hallo dearest NeedleworkMonday friends!

Here is my beautiful new hat! I had this material for a long time - some years - which Vittorio was gifted by his Bulgarian friend who works in the grape harvesting with him - a lot of dark denim with a light side... the scorchio inferno arrived recently in my part of Italy, and so I needed some shade for my head: I also have pale eyes which absorb a lot of light, and the bright marble masonry here is quite glaring under the mega-sun!

I lost a favourite hat on Ischia, back in 2015 - it was similarly wide-brimmed, with a dark blue denim but also with pale lovely flowers on it - AND a huge pink artificial flower - here is an old photo of that:

I went without an ideal hat for a long time, and was thinking if maybe I should attempt to make one, as every hat I saw in the mercato was a bit over-used or misshapen, and the new ones were mostly - well - crap. They are cheaply made if it was going to be affordable for my budget (of 50c to 2 Euros, haha!)! So I thought of this fabric again, and the old hat, and started cutting: as ever, no pattern or plan, just cutting intuitively:

I began with a shape for the brim... Actually, I remember that I spent a bit of ruminating time, imagining how the brim would be at an angle, and how the floppiness was important for shade.

And how the top part would form - how it would attach to the brim, and sit correctly.

In the end, it came out imperfectly-perfect, which is just my style! I've had a lot of positive feedback, especially from older women in Guardia Sanframondi, who are always very impressed that younger women still use their hands to make things! I had at least a couple of women ask me to take it off, so they could study the cosntruction of it. I love this connection through needlework!

Now, I thought that I might have more of a How To to share here, but going through the photos, I genuinely cannot really make out the steps: I cut the brim, and the sides of the top, and the very top of the top part - then I made a second shape, for the lining: it is a two-layered hat; then I just kind of sewed it...

I used the machine for the longer seams, and then hand-stitched the edges - I made the edge of the brim in the darker, contrasting side of the fabric, and the inside seam where the brim meets the inside of the top part/ peak, I made in a bias binding of a slightly different blue:

This makes the hat a bit more unique! Or one could criticise this for being less consistent! Heheh!

I found the hand-sewing of the rim of the brim rather painful: the thick material was heavy to work by hand, and my fingers needed the next part to be easier!

So I just constructed it all like this, as you see in all these photos... I really did try to make it chronological, but I really do not live chronologically: time passes differently when one has all Free Time: it becomes more cyclical, and memories are more like clusters of felt-imagery, rather than appearing on a timeline!

When it was constructed, I saw that the peak of the hat was a bit wibbly-wobbly/ rumpled (see above), and I made a ring of stitching around the top, to mostly-correct that:

It sits better now. The inside of the hat is a different shape than the outside, so it sits around the head nicely. It was actually kind of like two hats that I made, which I then sewed together. I could've made a lighter hat, just one layer, and lined it with a lighter material, but this seemed logical (or intuitive) at the time.

I was pretty immersed in the process! As ever, this makes it not so straightforward to make documentation photos, but I did take some snaps near the end, as I was photoshooting for my last week's white dress, and then I got my beautiful friend Michael angel - the writer from New York - to model it for me, as I was popping by her house after our extended-aperitivo, to pick up a dress that she wanted me to adjust for her. I loved her in it!!

The hat is practical, because it is very sturdy, and thus can be folded up inside a bag without a problem. This is good, as I like to only wear a hat or sunglasses when I am outside of the shade - which means taking them on and off as I walk up through town, depending on where the shadows protect me or the sun exposes me.

It is easy to lose even a favourite hat, which is why I make sure to put it down on top of or inside my bag, and not leave it anywhere.

I hope you enjoy this post! I encourage you to make your own hat - it is very empowering, and can provide good psychic protection, if you weave good juju into it, like I did!

In particular, I enjoyed working on the details in this hat project - and the neatness of working in this denim fabric: it's not a fabric I would choose to buy, but I love how sometimes gifted things can bring a great opportunity that we wouldn't have chosen (or bought for) ourselves! The neatness is something I adore in sewing by hand: I hope very much to develop my skills in tailoring and making neat things.

I cannot wait to share the next post with you, as I chopped up a very favourite huge silk skirt which was waaaaay to small for me now, and made two beautiful dresses out of it - with quite a bit of silk left over! I struggled a bit with buttonholes on the second one, but overall it stills looks good! I need to practise buttonholes until I master them!

HUGE LOVE!

www.claregaiasophia.com