My New Hat

Well the weather here today is beautiful. Cool and raining, which thankfully has put out the worst of the bushfires, there still may be some trees burning inside the trunk but hopefully the Country Fire Service will get them all. We had a fairly big fire about 30 km's from us, the wind was blowing it away from us so we didn't even get smoke which was good.
I spent today working on the hat. I haven't made a hat like this before. I used a mish-mash of instructions from a variety of sources including books and websites and instructions from Highland Felting's Pam who is a member of Aussie Felters, a yahoo group I belong too. I wanted to use up some of the pre-felts I had and did use up lots.
This first photo shows the black prefelt I used for the inside, I covered the resist with pieces of prefelt stitched together.



Then I tacked on more pieces of coloured prefelt so I had two layers, some of the prefelts I had bought and some I had made with silk and fabrics added.


Once they were all stitched down it looked a bit blah so I added the blue circles.


The last photo is of the hat so far. I added some silk fibres tops and throwsters waste and then put it between layers of curtain and rubbed it on both sides until it started to shrink. Then I took it out of the curtain and rolled it in bubble wrap, once it had started to shrink to nearly the size I wanted I rolled it in a bamboo mat and then by hand. I also put it in the microwave a couple of times and dunked it in cold water.


I am going to do some hand stitching on it as well as it is destined for an exhibition/sale in August if I can bear to part with it. I also have to get rid of the little crease you can see in the photo of the finished hat. Either that or I'll embroider over it. I don't have a project to work on at night at the moment so this one will do nicely. I still have lots of prefelt left I think I will make another hat.