In the last post, I took you through the technical aspect of making a fascinator and stopped just as it was getting juicy. The sinamay was wired, the edges were set and I had a general idea of a design. All that was left was execution. But that’s exactly where things started to get interesting. I started off in one direction but the hat kept telling me to pursue a different direction. Granted it’s sounds rather daft, as if the hat could actually converse with me. But truly, sometimes the creative process takes ahold of you and you just go. Or at least you should go…
As I was saying, a little voice kept saying: “bend me, bend me.” We weren’t talking about yoga. The process of making a hat can be a tad worrisome. After all, wire bends beautifully the first time, but creates a kinky mess when attempted to be pushed back to the original shape. Bending wire that has nothing to do with the proposed design is truly an act of faith.
I can compare the process of creating a sculptural fascinator or hat with working with a piece of stone. Many artists say that the statue was “inside” the stone waiting to be revealed. A piece off the left, a chisel from the bottom, followed by a dustball of stone chips and eventually the statue is revealed. Sometimes making a hat follows the same process. You bend it, pin it, squeeze it, wrap it, swirl it and before you know, out emerges a fabulous fascinator. Or at least that’s what you hope…as you emerge from the zone.
Granted I started out with one design in mind, but was carried away by a completely different design that was unique and a better reflection of the wearer. Once the design process was at this point, I needed to step away and leave the fascinator for a short period of time. This allowed me to view it with a fresh set of eyes. That’s when I discovered that for balance I needed to minimize some negative space and add some height on one side of the fascinator. Of course that meant that it didn’t fit into a standard hat box. Perhaps the hat was still trying to tell me something…
