With the suffragette outfit I am making I will need a hat. Looking at the styles, the big differentiators for modern hats are how flat the hat is on top and how much decoration they have.

Lowering the hat crown

I started with a basic sun hat. The hat isn’t natural straw, but for a first try it will do. I then cut into the crown of the hat in the middle. See above, I wanted the finished crown of the hat to be about an inch and a half high.

Next step was to hand stitch the top of the hat onto the hat base. Pretty simple.

To cover the strange edge on the crown of the hat, I started the decoration with draping black soft netting.

It is at this point that I realized how close Edwardian and early teens hats are to 18th Century hats. They are low crowned, wide brimmed hats, with piles of fluff and feathers on them. In both time periods the hats were worn high over large hairstyles, and they were complimentary but not necessarily matching the rest of the outfit. This leads me to think that this Edwardian hat, and others I make in the future can have multiple trimming options.

More on the feathers here. Photographed here is a feather constructed out of three individual small, full ostrich feathers. These feathers are from Lamplight Feathers.