Flowers, crinoline, and a place for millinery

This latest custom creation combines two more new skills (I said I wanted to learn this year, and I'm really doing it!) but I'll have to talk more about each of them another time.

I actually took another online class on working with crinoline, and I have 1.5 finished hats using those techniques, but no photos of the completed one yet. Still, it gave me a lot of confidence with the material, and I used the techniques in a slightly different way to bring this hat to life.

I feel like it's a real mix of vintage shape and details but using a less conventional material and realising the project using modern techniques. Definitely an unusual one for me, but I'm really pleased with it!

One thing that usually happens when I'm working on custom orders is that I'll get excited and ambitious, and this happened rather a lot here. I sketched flowers in the original design and figured I'd work out the details later. In the end, "the details" became me tackling yet another new skill - French flower making.

Traditional flower making involves heated tools applied to stiffened fabric (usually silk), and it seemed a bit daunting, but I managed to achieved some creditable results in my self-imposed crash course. The usual beginner flowers are roses, but yet again ambition got the better of me, and I veered off on my own to try pansies. In the end I think they are much easier as the petals are relatively flat and they only have 5 petals each, so I saved myself some time there!

It's not an ideal technique for working in tiny pockets of time in the evenings though, so my progress from here may be rather slow, but I know I'll get to it at some point.

This is the first hat of mine to attend the Melbourne Cup (as far as I know). I had mixed feelings about this and had a little reflect on my ethics. I love hats, and in Australia racing fashion is the primary millinery market and the pinnacle of the art is displayed at Melbourne Cup. Milliners involved in this field are pushing the boundaries all the time and creating techniques and styles that are beyond stunning and incredibly intricate. It is the most inspiring stuff.

Racing, on the other hand, stands for a whole lot that I am not keen on, but primarily the mistreatment of animals. (I'm not crash hot on gambling and binge-drinking either). It's mainly for this reason that I've not chased the racing fashion clients, and I'm glad that I chose not too. I've ended up much happier in my lovely vintage fashion niche anyway.

I don't really have a point there, just to say that as much as I am loving learning the newer techniques and making things in different styles, that I won't be changing direction into racing fashion, even though the average person in Australia assumes that it is all any milliners do.

And that I wish there could be some other event that gave every day people a socially-acceptable reason to wear extreme, high-fashion art millinery. That would be cool.

P.S. Thanks to Beccie for letting me use her photos in the post. All I had were the other ones with pins still in the hat!