Every other week, CRAFT’s awesome interns tell about the projects they’re building in the Craft: Labs, the trouble they’ve gotten into, and what they’ll make next.
By Lindsey North, projects intern
So your best friend calls — you’re to attend a fancy dress party, costumes mandatory. But you have nothing to wear! However, you see fun beads and feathers sitting on your crafting table …
From these small items, along with a clothes hanger, a headband, and a few scraps of fabric, you can make the perfect cocktail hat. (And if you want to make it completely outrageous, you can cover it in peacock feathers and sequins.)
In CRAFT Volume 10 we featured a Fancy Cocktail Hat and showed readers how to make a basic hat form. You start with a piece of metal wire — an old clothes hanger works wonderfully, since it’s light enough to bend easily but strong enough to hold its form.
After you form the wire into the shape you like, you cover it with light canvas or heavy-duty fabric, sewing the fabric onto the frame to create a base for adding beads and other embellishments.
The fun part of making a hat is adorning it. When I made my cocktail hat, I used pheasant feathers and modeled it after a hat from the 1920s. I didn’t go all-out with the embellishments; I wanted to keep it relatively simple, so I used only a few feathers and black satin ribbon (photo at top). I must say, it looks pretty stylish. But don’t let my minimalist way of decorating discourage you from using beads, ribbons, feathers, sequins, and anything else you can possibly think about attaching to a piece of fabric. And a little netting always looks nice! The next time you go to a party, go all-out with the headwear.
Your CRAFT intern,
Lindsey
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