I've spent quite a lot of time thinking about hats recently, so I thought I'd write a quick blog post about it.
A few weeks ago, Sure Start librarian Jan Nicholson got in touch to tell me that she was trying to make a replica of the double-pointed hat that illustrator Poly Bernatene had shown Priscilla the pig wearing in our picture book
The Princess of the Pig. The hat and the book were to be a birthday present for a colleague, who was also called Priscilla.
Jan was planning to make the hat out of paper and was hoping that, as a paper-engineer, I might be able to give her a bit of advice on how to go about it. The hat is made up of two intersecting cones, so I sent her this diagram with some basic instructions to get her started.
After a lot of trial and error Jan managed to make the rather marvellous piece of millinery that the real life Priscilla can be seen sporting below.
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| The real life Priscilla in her new hat! |
At the same time as Jan was putting the finishing touches to her Priscilla hat, I was making my own replica hat inspired by another picture book I'd done with Poly Bernatene. My hat was to be a copy of Captain Cut-throat's hat from
Here be Monsters.
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| The villainous Captain Cut-Throat in his pirate hat |
I'd already made a version of the Captain's hat for the
book's trailer, but that one was made out of paper and I needed something that was more durable that I could fold up and pack into a bag for school and library visits.
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| I made a paper Captain Cut-Throat hat for the book's trailer. |
After googling around for a bit, I came across milliner Claire Strickland's website which had a page of
useful advice on how to make hats out of plastazote foam, an ideal material for my pirate hat.
I started off by making a paper version of the hat to get the right shape and size to fit my head. Then I used this as a template to cut out a piece of 3mm thick black plastazote.
Although plastazote is quite tough, I was worried it might tear with continued use, so I stitched some sewing tape around the hat's opening to reinforce it.
Rather than paint the skull and cutlass symbol onto the foam, I cut it and the edging strip out of white plastazote and glued it in place with contact adhesive. To give the hat a little shape I also cut and glued a small pleat in the crown.
Then I folded the hat in half and glued the edges together to make a cornish pasty like shape. I used a couple of heavy books to keep the edges pressed together while they dried.
The hat was finished …
… but when I tried it on I was a little disappointed with the overall effect. I didn't look quite as piratey as I wanted to. There was something missing. I decided that I really needed a swashbuckling moustache as well.
So I used the plastazote offcuts to make a selection of moustaches.
