Sarah's Hat

As I said in the previous post, Sarah's wedding hat was also mine.  I had kept it in the top of the closet for twenty years.  I loved it the day I got married, but I had no fantasies that my daughters would want it.  Hats had gone out of fashion for weddings almost immediately after I got married.  I think I was riding the last little wave or may have even missed the trend altogether.  To be honest, hats still haven't come back, but when your girl decides on a steampunk wedding theme, you get to ignore current fashion trends with great abandon.

My hat had a veil that went past my knees in the back and a huge, leftover from the 80's bow on back.  The lace trim on the edge is the same lace that was on my dress.  It's easy to do things like that when your mother makes your dress and you trim your own hat.  I started with a blank white hat.  My sister and a family friend helped me wind on all that ribbon and tulle.  We hot glued on the fake flowers including a little bunch on the underside of the brim.  I loved my hat even if the weight of that monstrous bow and veiling tried to pull it off my head all day.

It's obviously dated now and it most definitely wasn't very steampunk, but the basic shape worked beautifully for a Victorian-ish wedding.  It's not perfectly time period appropriate, but steampunk is all about taking that aesthetic and tweaking it to your taste.

Since my daughter spent the summer working full time, I had the fun of retrimming the hat.  I removed the massive mess off the back and the ribbon twist from around the crown. The fake flowers  and lace stayed.

I made an eyebrow veil that covered the whole hat with tails that reached about shoulder blade length.  Over that I added a 20" ostrich plume.  That was interesting.  I had never worked with feathers before so I had to do some research to know how to form the plume so it bent the way I needed it to on the hat and how to attach it to the hat so it wouldn't fall off.  (Steam!)

She adored the hat.  It worked beautifully with her dress and looked very steampunk even if it wasn't a top hat.  The plume was just fantastic.  I ordered it off Amazon and it came pretty quickly and well packaged.  (Well, the packaging was ridiculously over sized, but the plume arrived in perfect condition.)   It's attached to the hat with both thread (at the front) and hot glue (at the back.)