Customer Photos / Custom Work: Megana and George

I just received these photos from Megana, a great regular customer who has bought several of my hats for herself and her daughter George.
George is pictured below wearing a Kit Kit mini bowler in long-nap fur felt with a cockade and feather spikes. She has enjoyed wearing it around the house and during a recent vaudeville-themed dance performance at school. I'm always so excited to outfit performers, especially such adorable ones.

And I recently completed the following custom hat for George's mom, Megana. Please excuse the fast-and-dirty quality of the photo- I needed to get this one out the door for a fast delivery so I didn't have time to take a proper studio photo. 

We designed this Vermeer cocktail hat to match an outfit Megana had custom made at Dark Garden, the trim was made using the same iridescent black/wine taffeta fabric as that she chose for her corset.

The rosette is made of layers and layers of pleated taffeta, alternating with black silk gazar, and frayed at the edges because Megana let me know that she likes texture. It also has black vintage crocheted veiling and a matching silk taffeta lining. I included several sets of feathers to wear with it, all matching the hat but totally different from each other so she can try out different looks- curled pheasant (seen here), fluffy wine-colored ostrich floss plumes, and others. I can't wait to see photos of how Megana looks in the whole outfit.

Poptastic Bride and Draped Hats

A House of Nines Design hat was recently featured with a gorgeous custom wedding gown by Dark Garden Corsetry on the blog Poptastic Bride.

The post features gorgeous photos by Jude Mooney.

 

For more photos from the shoot, see the full blog post here.







Some of you may remember this hat from an earlier post I made about my trip to Venice, Italy for Carnival in 2011. Here's a photo of me wearing it at the famous Caffe Florian on St. Mark's Square (with a different outfit, also by Dark Garden):

 

I've been going to Carnival for the last two years, and it's given me plenty of inspiration and impetus for creating some over-the-top, historically-inspired hats. Cocked hats, like tricorns and this bicorn, are especially fun to make, because after blocking the crown of the hat I shape the brim entirely by hand. Although I still use blocks to create most of my hat shapes, I have ventured more into draping the shapes lately, which is essentially hand-sculpting. For more information about hat blocks and how hats are made, see this post.

But draping isn't just for historical hats, I also use the same technique to make simpler, more modern hats like the Maxima, which is available now on my Etsy shop in several colors, with additional colors (pink! and more) coming for Fall/Winter 2012.