Amateur Bard

Rabbit needed a hat, but I didn’t want to go with the stereotypical, oversized muffin hat that bards always get stuck with. Besides, I’ve made a muffin hat before. I wanted to try my hand at something different!

After a brief and surprisingly fruitful search, I found myself enamored with the hat featured in Dürer’s Portrait of a Young Woman with a Red Beret:

There are a handful of patterns on the internet, some free, some for pay. I ended up using Tece de Kaxtone’s pattern as my base. I printed the pattern at 70%, which I had thought got me to the correct 5cm scale, but the hat turned out a bit large (which is impressive because I do have a large head!). Better than too small, I suppose!

I made this hat out of a blue cotton corduroy out of my stash. I worried that the corduroy might not have enough body on its own, so I flat lined it with some cotton broadcloth. Someday I will probably make a proper lining for it, but for the moment I’m planning to hand wash this hat so I just did a catching stitch to secure down the seam allowances.

So these hats would have been made out of wool. There are some knitting geniuses who have created a knitting pattern that is then intended to be felted. (That is on my distant future to-do list.) Most people online have made theirs out of wool yardage. Looking at portraits depicting these hats (and especially Dürer’s Young Woman above), it seems that the hat brims have two layers, so the inside of the brim is revealed in the slashing/splitting process. Rather than slashing my corduroy/cotton brim pieces, I made the brim up in four pieces and Just Pretended.

(Enjoy my impeccable late night “I just finished a project!” look.)

One of the interesting details of these hats is that the back brim overlaps on top of the front brim, which feels a bit backwards. I sewed a little recycled phone charm on to the right side (which I totally meant to do! Not at all accidentally sewing it on the wrong side at 10pm!)

Overall, I’m really pleased with the hat. I think it’s a little more angular/pointy/square-y than what you see in portraits, but part of that can probably be attributed to my choice of material. But it is a functional and plausibly historical head covering, and I think it’s more interesting than the usual muffin cap. It’s rather “out of period” than my local Ren faire by about 50 years; I’m rationalizing it as a piece that Rabbit has nabbed out of a theater costume store, maybe for a historical drama.