I haven’t shown you a picture of a hat for a while, so I need to rectify that straight away!
This gorgeous blue one is already sold. I showed a picture of it on Facebook, and a friend popped up and yelled “MINE!!” almost immediately! I still need to work out the best way of adding a custom order listing to Etsy, so that people can choose the colours and flowers that they like.
This one’s also sold – a lovely dark grey (anthracite) hat with guipure lace trim and a velvet button. The brief for this one was “sophisticated”, so I hope I’ve managed to achieve that. This was also the first hat which necessitated making a slightly different size from my blocks, so I hope it fits!
This one is for sale, it’s listed over on Etsy. The lace trim is one that came to me in a bundle with all of the vintage haberdashery, and it’s embellished with some little flower-shaped beads. I’m on the lookout for more lace motifs like this (not necessarily in ivory), as I’m really pleased with the way it’s turned out.
And one more, again listed on Etsy. Fuchsia pink this time, which is turning out to be my best selling colour so far! This one has a wider lace trim, gathered underneath another velvet button.
I had a conversation at the market on Sunday which worried me a little bit – it seems that people might not entirely understand that I’m actually making these hats, rather than just buying them in from somewhere and then trimming them. I suppose I should take that as a compliment, as it means they don’t look “hand made”. But then it also means that customers might not understand the inherent value in the time I’ve taken to choose the colours, choose the block styles, work the felt, and then add every single stitch by hand rather than machine. Believe me, doing all of the sewing by hand takes hours for even the simplest of these styles.
That’s not a complaint, of course – it was a conscious decision I took right at the beginning, to do everything by hand. It just means I need to make sure that people are aware of all that work, and that the hats are reaching the eyes of people who actually value it. How I achieve that is another matter, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out.