Sparkly!
95% finished with my top hat, Just needs the ribbon band sewn on and a little tweaking here and there. I'm really pleased with the finished result, I can't wait until I have some event I can wear this hat too! As you can see, my hat is no longer made of velvet! My teacher suggested I use a stretch fabric for my hat because of the curved shape (The squiggly velvet didn't have much bias stretch) When I told her I wasn't super enthused she pointed to the picture I had brought in of TopsyTurvy's Sequin tot hat and said it was ok if I wanted to use sequin stretch fabric. My inner magpie could not resist the challenge.
The inside band didn't want to conform as nicely as the outside one, I need to steam it more aggressively to lie flat. The lining is some black habotai I had left over from the berge I made a while ago.
It was surprisingly difficult to find an opaque stretch sequin fabric I could afford, most where on sheer mesh or $80 dollars! After going to four shops I finally found a mostly-opague one for $20 at Michel Lavines while running an errand for my internship. The only downside I found to working with the sequin fabric was that it took SO MUCH TIME to clip all of the sequins out of the seam allowance. If I had not had a whole month to work on this hat I would have been in a serious time crunch.
The mulling we used was cotton baby flannel. Not really my favorite but it was free and it got the job done. Once I was done mulling I added a layer of thin black knit to prevent white show-through.
Voila!