Willow brim block, part one!
The show on deck right now is Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, which affords me the opportunity to do a bunch of great craftwork. There are two hats in particular for the character of Lady Bracknell which i'll be chronicling in detail, as they involve a topic near and dear to the modern milliner's mythos: willow.
Willow is pretty much the North American milliner's Holy Grail. Even when it was more commonly used, it was never easy or cheap to obtain here; it's made from an indiginous Spanish grass called esparto, bonded with starch to a layer of fine cotton crinoline. The crinoline side is the right side, and the esparto side is the wrong side. It's known by a host of other names: willow-plate, willowing, esparterie, espartre, espartra, sparterie, and spartre.
Esparto grass grows best in southern Spain and northern Africa, and is also known by a lot of other names: Spanish grass, alfa grass, alpha fibre, halfah grass, and atocha. Japan apparently got into the willow market at one point, raising esparto in rice paddies, though the climate there produces a brittler version of esparto than the Mediterranean does, so the Japanese willow is/was considered "inferior" as a result.
Whatever you call it, nowadays, it's rare as the dodo. Some folks say that it's no longer being manufactured; I used to buy that, but then i kept reading articles about Philip Treacy and his block-carver, Lorenzo Re, using sparterie in his block-conceptualizing process. If Philip Treacy is commissioning hatblocks from his own hand-formed sparterie sculptures, he must have a modern source, perhaps making it just for the high-end couture market. He's not using 50-year-old sheets of willow.
I'm not Philip Treacy though, so that's exactly what i'm doing.
When i first took the crafts artisan job at PlayMakers, i went through all the supplies in every drawer and cabinet and nook and cranny, taking stock of what i had to determine an initial inventory. In the course of that stocktaking, i discovered an amazing treasure-trove: four sheets of vintage willow in pristine condition.
The way it felt to find them, well, i think i have a tiny glimmer of an idea how Howard Carter's excavation team felt when they found that first step leading down to King Tut's tomb.
"Holy crap, this is it!"
I knew the minute i saw it what it was, the minute i touched it, despite having only read about it in millinery texts: esparterie.
For the past five years i have hoarded it, providing my millinery students with tiny 1" samples as part of our media swatch cards, and once allowing one student to cut a tiny sideband for a miniature burlesque top hat from half of one sheet. I've been waiting for the right show, in the right time period, with the right costume designer, someone who'd design a willow-appropriate hat for a performer i could trust to wear such a thing with care.
It's like some string of portents in a sword-and-sorcery novel: that time has come.
This is that show, and our designer, Anne Kennedy, is someone I've got a very good communicative rapport with, and for whom i've made many interesting hats. Lady Bracknell is to be played by PRC company actor Ray Dooley, a consummate professional who treats his hats with respect and care.
Today, I began the process of working with willow.
So, Lady Bracknell has two hats, one of which is a small tilted-brim Eugenie hat modeled on a derby crown shape, and the other a wide assymetrical-brim confection with a pinch crown and a pile of feathers. Both will be blocked in wool felt, eventually. But to block a hat, you need a hat block, yes?
It's no problem for me to block the crowns of these hats. I've got a great new pinch crown block i'm itching to break in, and a small 21" dome block will serve for the Derby-Eugenie. But the brims, that's another story. I could carve them from blue foam, like i did the Rich Lady hyperboloid-crown bonnet from Nicholas Nickleby...but blue foam has to be cut up and stacked up and glued and carved, and these brim shapes could be done easier and quicker using a sparterie block.
There's some great information on making brims and brim blocks in Denise Dreher's book From the Neck Up, and also in Jane Loewen's 1925 text, Millinery. I pored over them, planned out my shapes, and set to work.
Here is my 21" dome block, onto which i've taped out my crown shape (backward!).
Willow pinned to the block at the four quarters.
Dreher recommended i cut the willow on the bias, 2" wider than the widest part of the brim and 2" longer than the brim's outer circumference. This is because the elasticity potential of the material is off the chain, people. Once you activate it (i used the tabletop hat steamer you see up there at the right, a damp sponge, and a fine mister), you can bend and shape it into the craziest bulbous curves. At the risk of getting too far into the vocabulary of hardcore math, i knew i wanted a sort of elongated half-torus shape, curving down and out and back up again around the headsize oval.
So, in the above picture i've just got it misted/steamed, pinned on, and that first right front quarter beginning to take shape.
There's the whole thing pulled in around the headsize opening and curled up.
Side view of shape in progress.
Because willow is a two-ply textile, you can do a technique called a "skinned join" where you need to seam it, to create a smoother look. You peel back the crinoline layer of one side to the seamline, trim the other on the seamline and insert it, then smooth the crinoline back down so that one side is sandwiched inside the other. Then you stitch through all layers to secure it, thus:
Crinoline layer peeled back.
I used red and black stitching since this is just a block form, for photographic contrast.
Here i've whipped on a wire that will stabilize the headsize opening,
also in black thread so you can see it in these pics.
At this point, i misted/steamed and shaped the willow back over the wire, whipping it down to itself for a double-layer around that opening. I'll stabilize it even further later on. If this were going to be a brim instead of a block, i'd have trimmed away the esparto layer in the headsize opening seam allowance and just folded the crinoline back over it, to minimize bulk.
I shaped the brim wire to the particular edgeline i wanted, checking it against the swoop of the willow half-torus i had, judging where i wanted to dip it lower or carry it up. I made that wire a bit smaller in circumference than the widest part of the half-torus of willow, so it would have to curve back in a bit at places, the way a bowler or Homburg brim has been curled over a curling shackle on the sides.
Checking the headsize opening on the crown block, and whipping in the brim wire.
There's that brim we wanted!
If you look closely at the above image, you can see that i've left some ease in the headsize opening to accomodate the thickness of the felt when i block it. It can't sit flush with the crown or else where would the hatbody go when it's being shaped?
This is an example of what probably inspired that quote by Evan Esar:
Milliners never seem to have any difficulty discovering geometrical shapes wholly unknown to mathematicians.
Oblique side view.
Opposite side.
Historically speaking, one would then coat this whole thing with a substance called Spartalac, formulated for solidifying willow shapes. Except, you can surmise that, if it's so difficult to find willow itself people want your firstborn in exchange, where can you find Spartalac? Probably nowhere, i figured. Dreher described it as a cross between gesso and plaster, so my plan for a Spartalac substitute is going to be several coats of gesso on the crinoline side, topped off with a couple-few coats of Sculpt-or-Coat, and some gypsona plaster strips layered inside to further support the structure for the pressure of felt blocking.
Gessoed form drying on a jug of vinegar in the dye shop.
It's not perfect, but i can make it work and i'm ultimately quite thrilled with the final shape. Plus, i'm at about 5 hours' time spent on it, as opposed to the double-that-time it'd have taken to stack, glue, and carve blue foam acceptably. Good job!
That brings me to the end of Part One of this willow-block-making adventure. Over the next couple-three weeks, i'll be forming the second brim and blocking these hats, and i'll have lots more images and commentary yet to come!
Willow is pretty much the North American milliner's Holy Grail. Even when it was more commonly used, it was never easy or cheap to obtain here; it's made from an indiginous Spanish grass called esparto, bonded with starch to a layer of fine cotton crinoline. The crinoline side is the right side, and the esparto side is the wrong side. It's known by a host of other names: willow-plate, willowing, esparterie, espartre, espartra, sparterie, and spartre.
Esparto grass grows best in southern Spain and northern Africa, and is also known by a lot of other names: Spanish grass, alfa grass, alpha fibre, halfah grass, and atocha. Japan apparently got into the willow market at one point, raising esparto in rice paddies, though the climate there produces a brittler version of esparto than the Mediterranean does, so the Japanese willow is/was considered "inferior" as a result.
Whatever you call it, nowadays, it's rare as the dodo. Some folks say that it's no longer being manufactured; I used to buy that, but then i kept reading articles about Philip Treacy and his block-carver, Lorenzo Re, using sparterie in his block-conceptualizing process. If Philip Treacy is commissioning hatblocks from his own hand-formed sparterie sculptures, he must have a modern source, perhaps making it just for the high-end couture market. He's not using 50-year-old sheets of willow.
I'm not Philip Treacy though, so that's exactly what i'm doing.
When i first took the crafts artisan job at PlayMakers, i went through all the supplies in every drawer and cabinet and nook and cranny, taking stock of what i had to determine an initial inventory. In the course of that stocktaking, i discovered an amazing treasure-trove: four sheets of vintage willow in pristine condition.
The way it felt to find them, well, i think i have a tiny glimmer of an idea how Howard Carter's excavation team felt when they found that first step leading down to King Tut's tomb.
"Holy crap, this is it!"
I knew the minute i saw it what it was, the minute i touched it, despite having only read about it in millinery texts: esparterie.
For the past five years i have hoarded it, providing my millinery students with tiny 1" samples as part of our media swatch cards, and once allowing one student to cut a tiny sideband for a miniature burlesque top hat from half of one sheet. I've been waiting for the right show, in the right time period, with the right costume designer, someone who'd design a willow-appropriate hat for a performer i could trust to wear such a thing with care.
It's like some string of portents in a sword-and-sorcery novel: that time has come.
This is that show, and our designer, Anne Kennedy, is someone I've got a very good communicative rapport with, and for whom i've made many interesting hats. Lady Bracknell is to be played by PRC company actor Ray Dooley, a consummate professional who treats his hats with respect and care.
Today, I began the process of working with willow.
So, Lady Bracknell has two hats, one of which is a small tilted-brim Eugenie hat modeled on a derby crown shape, and the other a wide assymetrical-brim confection with a pinch crown and a pile of feathers. Both will be blocked in wool felt, eventually. But to block a hat, you need a hat block, yes?
It's no problem for me to block the crowns of these hats. I've got a great new pinch crown block i'm itching to break in, and a small 21" dome block will serve for the Derby-Eugenie. But the brims, that's another story. I could carve them from blue foam, like i did the Rich Lady hyperboloid-crown bonnet from Nicholas Nickleby...but blue foam has to be cut up and stacked up and glued and carved, and these brim shapes could be done easier and quicker using a sparterie block.
There's some great information on making brims and brim blocks in Denise Dreher's book From the Neck Up, and also in Jane Loewen's 1925 text, Millinery. I pored over them, planned out my shapes, and set to work.
Here is my 21" dome block, onto which i've taped out my crown shape (backward!).
Willow pinned to the block at the four quarters.
Dreher recommended i cut the willow on the bias, 2" wider than the widest part of the brim and 2" longer than the brim's outer circumference. This is because the elasticity potential of the material is off the chain, people. Once you activate it (i used the tabletop hat steamer you see up there at the right, a damp sponge, and a fine mister), you can bend and shape it into the craziest bulbous curves. At the risk of getting too far into the vocabulary of hardcore math, i knew i wanted a sort of elongated half-torus shape, curving down and out and back up again around the headsize oval.
So, in the above picture i've just got it misted/steamed, pinned on, and that first right front quarter beginning to take shape.
There's the whole thing pulled in around the headsize opening and curled up.
Side view of shape in progress.
Because willow is a two-ply textile, you can do a technique called a "skinned join" where you need to seam it, to create a smoother look. You peel back the crinoline layer of one side to the seamline, trim the other on the seamline and insert it, then smooth the crinoline back down so that one side is sandwiched inside the other. Then you stitch through all layers to secure it, thus:
Crinoline layer peeled back.
I used red and black stitching since this is just a block form, for photographic contrast.
Here i've whipped on a wire that will stabilize the headsize opening,
also in black thread so you can see it in these pics.
At this point, i misted/steamed and shaped the willow back over the wire, whipping it down to itself for a double-layer around that opening. I'll stabilize it even further later on. If this were going to be a brim instead of a block, i'd have trimmed away the esparto layer in the headsize opening seam allowance and just folded the crinoline back over it, to minimize bulk.
I shaped the brim wire to the particular edgeline i wanted, checking it against the swoop of the willow half-torus i had, judging where i wanted to dip it lower or carry it up. I made that wire a bit smaller in circumference than the widest part of the half-torus of willow, so it would have to curve back in a bit at places, the way a bowler or Homburg brim has been curled over a curling shackle on the sides.
Checking the headsize opening on the crown block, and whipping in the brim wire.
There's that brim we wanted!
If you look closely at the above image, you can see that i've left some ease in the headsize opening to accomodate the thickness of the felt when i block it. It can't sit flush with the crown or else where would the hatbody go when it's being shaped?
This is an example of what probably inspired that quote by Evan Esar:
Milliners never seem to have any difficulty discovering geometrical shapes wholly unknown to mathematicians.
Oblique side view.
Opposite side.
Historically speaking, one would then coat this whole thing with a substance called Spartalac, formulated for solidifying willow shapes. Except, you can surmise that, if it's so difficult to find willow itself people want your firstborn in exchange, where can you find Spartalac? Probably nowhere, i figured. Dreher described it as a cross between gesso and plaster, so my plan for a Spartalac substitute is going to be several coats of gesso on the crinoline side, topped off with a couple-few coats of Sculpt-or-Coat, and some gypsona plaster strips layered inside to further support the structure for the pressure of felt blocking.
Gessoed form drying on a jug of vinegar in the dye shop.
It's not perfect, but i can make it work and i'm ultimately quite thrilled with the final shape. Plus, i'm at about 5 hours' time spent on it, as opposed to the double-that-time it'd have taken to stack, glue, and carve blue foam acceptably. Good job!
That brings me to the end of Part One of this willow-block-making adventure. Over the next couple-three weeks, i'll be forming the second brim and blocking these hats, and i'll have lots more images and commentary yet to come!