Hat fixings

We seem to be on "Hat week" in the blogging world, which is kinda neat that we are all thinking along the same lines. Here it is too cold to do much else than stay in doors and make hat repairs in the evening. I had never heard the term "brass monkeys" before moving to the UK and now I use it all the time.

Aren't those feathers lush - the hat is part of my Christmas pressie, but I'll show you pics of it when I'm all glammed up. Right now I promised I would fill you in on hat fixings to round off my last post. 

Wearing a hat is all about feeling confident in it...and confidence comes best with comfort, which includes not worrying about it becoming askew.

We are back to the inside of the same hat as before - sorry!

So to hold hats on, I use a combination of tools:
Elastic: A length of hat elastic (fine and round) that is secured on both sides of the hat. This goes behind your ears and under the back of your hair, not under your chin. (chin ribbons are reserved for bonnets and chinese style sunhats.)
You want the elastic to be the same colour or darker than your hair for the best hideability. You can buy specially made elastic with prongs at both ends on ebay, or plain hat elastic by the roll does just as well, which you then just knot at both ends to fasten it. Haberdashery shops normally have it in black or white only. I am better off with black as white shows up too much.

Half a comb: for more stability on hats without much brim I often attach a comb at the front of the hat. You only want a little one, so that it doesn't muss your hair up too much, so I snap one in half and hand sew it upside down (so that it is right way up when the hat is also right way up) to the ribbon. You need to go over and over with the needle and cotton a few times to make it secure, as on the green hat above. This makes an amazing difference to the hat stay-on-a-bility when combined with the elastic, as the hat can't fall back because of the comb, and it can't fall forward because of the elastic. Sorted!
(By the way - not all chemists or even all Boots have them in the UK, I had to go to four before I found mine - what's that all about? I thought they were still staple hair tools?)

Hat pin: Hat pins are a lovely way to add a bit more interest to a hat and some security. To find out more I'm going to send you over to Solanah who has a lovely post about how to wear them here, and here about how to decorate them. I've never decorated one before so I might have to try that. I agree with her wholeheartedly about anchoring your hair down first with bobby pins, because besides holding the hat down, it also stops the hat being able to move and drag your hairstyle with it.

Let me know how you get on with your hat fixings, or if you have techniques of your own to share!

Shona x

Orienteering - not the sporty kind

As predicted on my post "Hat Hair" I am now fixated on small "New Look" style hats. Soooo predictable me!
The fancy ones are sometimes called a cocktail hat or "Juliet Cap" and these often have wire on the inside so you can manipulate them to clamp onto your head. They are surprisingly easy to wear because they don't get in the way. They look like this:

Now that I am hunting for them on esty and ebay, I see an extraordinary number of them displayed the wrong way around, which makes it hard for shopping! So I thought I might share some basics of hat orienteering.

If any hat has a label on it, then that will go at the back. So for this one, that means that the plainer, flat pleated velvet bit is actually on the front. This makes sense as 50s ladies often had shorter cropped hair dos with lots of lovely height or curls at the front and a Juliet cap would be worn at the crown (towards the back, not the front) of the head to show the hair off. Quite often, but not always, this will mean that the decoration - a bow, feather, or a cluster of flowers, might be at the back of the head or the side, as it would be seen more easily there.

If there is no label, then the grosgrain ribbon that runs around the inside is the best clue. Where it joins or overlaps is the back of the hat. I have only met very few hats with no ribbon at all, in which case, you can experiment and will probably find that it is molded in such away to accomodate the lumpy crown part of your head. When I say lumpy, you know what I mean eh?

There is a bit of chat about hats going on right now so you can also pop over and read about hat pins with Solanah, and more hat hair style ideas with Charlotte. I have a second post (this was getting too long) about keeping them on coming right up too.

Shona x

Hat Hair

One of my pressies from The Wolf at Christmas was the book "Vintage Hairstyling: Retro Styles with Step-by-Step Techniques" by Lauren Rennells. What a great hubby!  He's so clever! (ok, ok, I told him it was what I wanted). Anyway, I am so in love with this book!

available on Amazon

Over time I have worked out that I am allergic to most setting lotions and tried to ignore the issue. Diluting it only does half the trick and I still end up taking an antihistamine tablet in order to not be all blood-shot eyed and snuffy-nosed, which really defeats the purpose of getting ones hair all glam! 

Realising that I needed to see how my hair went with a wet set, using water only, I was feeling rather dubious about it until I came across the techniques in Lauren's book, and was doubly excited when I saw the technique called "Hat Hair". Up until then I had believed that my hair was really a bit too long and heavy for a small 50s hat.

I decided that the Sunday vintage fair at Hammersmith (a "goodies purchased" post to follow) would be an excellent chance to test it out and I spent all Saturday day in pin curls and rollers. Since I would be sleeping on rollers that I thought I would also try out what Charly has recommended to me in the past - and use perming rods where the recipe called for foam rollers at the back.

This was taken after the fair, after I had been rooting around in button boxes and trying other hats on, so it is now a little mussed up and fluffy. I was very happy with the way it worked out though and the curls and height stayed put.

But ha ha! Look at the frizz I got at the back!! To be fair, that was because I was running too late in the morning to spend long brushing it out and blending in pomade, which would improve it greatly. With today being Tuesday though, the curls have settled down nicely and are still going strong so a wet set certainly has more staying power than a hot roller set. With looser curls you are supposed to arrange them around the base of the hat which would give me both a suitable length of a 50s hair-do and be much prettier.

So all and all, I am very happy that I can work on fine tuning my technique and adorn myself with smaller 50s hats. Etsy/ebay here we come!

Lisa Freemont Street, who is enviably knowledgeable about hair stuff, has done a utube review of the book if you are interested (for those viewing at work, be warned: it has sound!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHHXBW5yAJQ


Have a good day everyone! 


Shona x