Every now and then, another hatmaker will ask me a question.
Usually it’s something practical.
What stiffener do you use?
What kind of stitch do you use?
Where do you source your materials?
And I have to admit, there’s still a little part of me that finds it strange that people ask me these things.
Not because I don’t know the answers. Usually, I do.
It’s more that I remember when I was the one trying to find them. The shoe is now on the other sock.
Which got me thinking about how I actually learnt to make hats in the first place.
Learning without a teacher
The title of this piece might suggest that I learnt without anybody teaching me. That isn't quite true.
There have been books, videos, articles, forums and plenty of other people's work to learn from.
What I didn't have was somebody standing beside me saying:
“Right, this is what you need to learn next.”
I had to work that bit out for myself.
I think I've always learnt that way.
Connecting the pieces
I’m a visual learner. I need to see something, understand how the pieces fit together and, ideally, be able to picture the result.
I learnt to read and tell the time by using the TV guide. After all, I’m a child of the 80s/90s — those were my analogue humble beginnings.
The TV guide gave me something I could connect things to. I could match the numbers on the page to the numbers on the clock and then to what was actually happening on the television.
The same thing happened with tape players and recorders. Remember them?
I used to mess about with them, figuring out how to overdub from one tape to another, what the different inputs and outputs did and how the signal travelled through the equipment.
I liked knowing what happened when you plugged one thing into another.
If it worked, I wanted to know why.
If it didn't, I wanted to know why that happened too.
That way of thinking has probably followed me through most of my working life.
A few previous lives
I've had a lot of different jobs, and very few of them came with a certificate that specifically said I was qualified to do them.
I counted stock.
I laminated brochures.
I manufactured parts.
I worked for an events company and eventually became deputy team leader of an intelligent lighting department.
I decided I wanted to become a food writer, despite having no cookery training, so I enrolled on an apprenticeship and spent many years working in kitchens.
Later, I worked in office-based internet tech support, film and television props, a musical instrument repairs department and finance.
The industries changed.
The basic approach didn't.
Give me something to understand and I'll usually have a go at figuring it out.
Making myself useful
I was once given two pieces of advice at work that have stuck with me.
“If you're going to be here 8–10 hours a day, make life easy for yourself.”
And:
“Make yourself irreplaceable.”
Well, three pieces of advice if you include “don't eat yellow snow”, but that's probably one for another day.
Making life easier meant understanding what I was doing, preparing properly and finding better ways of doing things. It's not about avoiding hard work but figuring out what makes it easier. Like the saying, "work smarter, not harder" or "You can't lead a glass horse to hot water...or something like that."
Making yourself useful meant learning.
I suppose I carried both ideas into hatmaking.
Taking hats apart
When I first started, I pulled together whatever knowledge I already had. Basic sewing skills. An understanding of shapes and styles. An eye for how I wanted things to look.
Then I watched everything I could find.
I read.
I researched.
And I started taking hats apart.
I would unpick the ribbon hat band, the sweatband and the liner. I'd look at the materials, the stitches, how things had been cut and how the brim had been shaped.
Then I'd ask:
How did they do that?
And I'd go looking for the answer.
Finding out what I didn’t know
My first hat blocked from scratch beautifully.
I was fascinated by how simply I could achieve an open crown shape with clean lines and a smooth appearance.
But it swiftly went downhill.
I'd never properly considered how I was going to fit the sweatband.
The ribbon I'd bought was polyester, which turned out to be completely unsuitable for what I wanted to do with it.
There were things I hadn't thought about because I didn't know I needed to think about them yet.
So I became more methodical.
I started documenting everything.
What I'd done.
What worked.
What didn't.
And, quite often:
There's something missing — what is it?
Understanding why it works
One of those things was ribbon.
If you simply put a straight piece of ribbon around a crown, the top edge will be loose and wrinkled rather than sitting neatly against the felt.
The crown is often slightly conical, wider at the bottom and narrower towards the top, so my first thought was that I just needed to pull the ribbon tighter.
That produced unwanted twists and distorted ribs in the grosgrain.
So I went looking again.
Eventually I found information about what is sometimes called "swirling" the ribbon — using light steam and an iron to encourage the ribbon into a curve, effectively making one edge slightly longer than the other.
Suddenly it made sense.
It wasn't just a technique to remember.
I understood why it worked.
And that distinction matters to me.
I'm much more interested in understanding something than simply being told the answer.
Proof of concept
I can often visualise the finished hat before I make it.
I can see the shape, the proportions and the general feeling of what I want it to become.
That doesn't mean I know every step needed to get there.
It gives me somewhere to start.
I make the thing.
Then I can look at what I've made and compare it with what I had in my head.
Something will be wrong.
Or something will be missing.
Or something will work better than I expected.
And that gives me the next question.
My workshop is full of work-in-progress hats that are really proof-of-concept hats.
Things I tried because I wanted to know whether they would work.
Some did.
Some didn't.
But each one gave me another piece of information.
When the questions change
And somewhere along the way, the questions changed.
I went from asking other people how things were done to having other people ask me.
Which brings me to the slightly awkward question of what makes someone qualified.
I don't think there's one answer to that.
A certificate is certainly one form of evidence. There are professions where formal training and qualifications are essential.
But there are other kinds of knowledge too.
Experience.
Practice.
Problem solving.
Knowing what happens when something goes wrong.
Knowing how to fix it.
Knowing enough to explain why something works rather than simply knowing that it works.
The evidence is there
I don't think I've ever particularly thought of myself as an expert.
And yet here I am, answering questions from other hatmakers.
There's still a little voice that finds that slightly surprising.
Not because I don't believe I can make hats.
I know I can.
It’s more the oddness of being on the other side of the question. I’ve been so busy looking at the sausage that I hadn’t noticed someone had started asking me how the sausage was made. I’m not sure when I became the sausage department.
I've learnt to work around that voice rather than trying to silence it.
Because the evidence is there.
I've made the hats.
I've made mistakes.
I've taken things apart.
I've tried things that didn't work.
I've figured out why.
I've made the next one better.
And now, sometimes, someone asks me how I did it.
Make the thing
For anyone starting out in hatmaking, millinery or any craft for that matter, I think the biggest hurdle is simply making the thing.
Not making the perfect thing.
Just making the thing.
Argh, stop saying THING!
Once you've made it, you have something tangible to look at.
Something to question.
Something to change.
Something to take apart and try again.
After that, it's just a case of shifting the pieces around to paint the picture you want.
That same process of picturing a hat and working out how to make it carries into my commissions. If you have a hat in mind, you can read about Custom Orders and get in touch.
Learning without a teacher
I suppose that's what learning without a teacher has meant for me.
Not learning without information.
There has been plenty of that.
It's learning without somebody telling you exactly which question to ask next.
You have to find that bit out for yourself.