To have a proper dress makes it a lot easier to just change it a little than sewing a completely new dress.
I will show you when it's done.
For now, I want to show you how I created a suiting hat that helps the dress to look less like a wedding dress.
My mom showed me -> this video about a woman creating an edwardian inspired hat herself which I used as a guideline.
Warning: lots of hand-sewing and precise work needed. If you are a rather unpatient person like me, listen to meditative, relaxing music. That helped me a lot to stay calm at any point where something went wrong. Also, it made me feel better and made this project like a meditation. Especially at the end, when I glued all the flowers on it was relaxing and felt like I was doing Ikebana on a hat.
This is what I used:
- Simple straw hat with big brim (light colour)
- needle & white threat
- wire
- white taft (light fabric) and white chiffon
- Hot glue
- green coloured lace (or any sort of ribbon)
- lots of decorative fake flowers and leafes (and also feathers)
(For the hat, the fabric and the flowers I approximately payed 65€. It is also very time consuming. I worked on it for about 6 hours, but it was worth it.)
I used this simple hat and removed the black ribbon.
Then I measured how much of the wire (green) I would need to sew it on the edge of the brim, cut it and hand-sewed it on (red) with a little bit of the two ends still standing out.
This helps to form the hat at the end, because in past times slightly bowed hats were fashionable.
At the end, I secured the ends of the wire with some tape and simply sewed over it.
I measured how much of the taft I would need to cover the brim of the hat and abut 2 to 3 cm over it and sketched this length all around the hat.
And cut it out.
Then I folded the taft over the brim, so it lyes tightly arount the edge of it. Therefore I needed to fold the fabric organicly (red). I glued it on with hot glue.
This is what it looked like. I'm not a perfectionist and i liked that the folds were uneven sometimes. It is also very hard to make them look perfectly the same, but you can try if you want.
Now I turned the hat around. I needed to cut it open again, but I left 1 to 2 cm at the edge.
Thereby I could roughly sew the fabric on the ribbon on the inner side of the hat, so that the folds on the other side would stay tight.
I cut out another circle of the fabric that approximately fitted the uncovered part of the hat.
I sewed at the edge of this circle with a gathering stitch to make it look like a bonnet.
After that, it fits the hat. With the rest of the threat used before, I secured it by wrapping the threat around and tighten.
After adhusting the folds a little, I glued the lace on with hot glue to hide the edge.
I cut one rectangle out of the chiffon, so that the long side can be glued on the edge of the brim and the shorter side would cover all the inside of the hat. My mom used a special tool to hem both long edges.
One of them I glued not to tight to the edge of the rim with small amounts of hot glue.
After that, the hat looked like this...
But the hat was too large for me anyway and I wanted it to fit on an edwardian like hairstyle, so I kept all of the rest on. I simply used strong glue and applied it in circles on the inner ribbon and the inside of the hat.
Then I glued all the chiffon onto itself so it still looks like this...
With help of my creepy assistant I decided which side of the hat was the most beautiful, then I bowed the sides of it a little.
I had sketched out how I wanted it to look like before, now I just draped some flowers on it to figure out what looks the best.
I made photographs of all angles and started to glue them on one at a time (with hot glue, of course).
It turned out so pretty! What do you think?
Here are some close-ups:
