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I have a dream, a dream of a future where silly hats are the norm, where the bareheaded are laughed at behind their backs and towering millinery reaches peaks of silliness only reached by chopins and poulaines
Towards this end I offer this week’s pattern, courtesy of Modern Knitter. While certainly not the most ridiculous hat offered here, I see it as the beginning of a slippery slope off the deep end towards silly hats.
THIS
.
COULD
BE
OUR
FUTURE!
Ignore the signs at your peril.
Some time last year a New York law must have passed mandating all baristas wear hats while working, because one day the folk serving me coffee are bareheaded, the next I walked in and wonder if it’s Silly Hat Day. One fellow’s wearing a rasta beanie, the other a cowboy hat, and another wore one of those Irish hats you should not wear if you’re under 50.
Eventually baristas wearing doofy toques became commonplace, even banal. Recently though, a lady at the local coffee shop took the law to the next level, flouting intent while following the letter. She donned a wee straw spectator, a teeny poof of a boater tied on with string and sporting a thin band of ribbon around the brim, a ‘hat’ 100% useless in preventing any sort of hair from floating into foodstuffs.
Tinier.
TINIER.
Eh, close enough.
In honor of that small bit of ridiculous haberdashery, I present this bit, the Glow Crinkle Hat, courtesy of The Handicrafter (Winter & Spring ’33-’34). Enjoy!
Oooh, ain’t this a luverly pattern! Cor blimey, couldn’t yer picture yorself wearin’ such a charmin’ ‘at out on the tahn, peraps ridin’ the chuffin’ lorry out for an evenin’ by the Thames! Apologies, I can’t type very well in Dickensien Street Urchin. Seriously though, I’m having trouble picturing who else would wear such a chapeau.
However, I’ve compiled a short list of potential candidates:
Stage production of Great Expectations
Stage production of Saucy Jack
Elegant Gothic Lolita Yarn Fanatic
Steampunk LARPer (hats are steampunk, right?)
Uhh, that’s it. Further suggestions are welcome. The pattern comes from Modern Knitting, a quarterly magazine chockablock with ridiculous hattery, though this one certainly tops the rest (I can never resist a bad pun. Which is to say any pun). This might be a good time to point out I celebrate Russian Orthodox April Fool’s Day.
Tags: crochet, hat, tophattery, vintage
I dug these patterns with considerable difficulty from the belly of the New York Public Library. I’m quite sure they sat untouched for years on their shelves, and would have quietly crumbled to fragments and dust with no one the wiser had I not intervened. As it was, in handling and photocopying them I’m pretty sure I fast-forwarded that destruction by 10 years.
Perhaps someone who has greater familiarity with general library organization can clue me in to why they bind certain books together; each volume I sought was trapped amidst seemingly random texts. One was between a German book on what appeared to be house care and a Swedish knot-tying pamphlet, another was sandwiched with several Good Housekeeping excerpts from the 60′s and practically disintegrated hand-typed minutes from some meeting of the Italian Electrician’s Guild.
On a slightly random tangent- what lies beneath the New York Public Library? If their ridiculously hi-tech screening room, with its clear glass floors and design straight out of ‘Diabolik’, is any indication, at least 5 floors of medieval stonemasonry housing a bulk of books (the majority of their collection is stored ‘off-site’-ie in a warehouse in Newark). Some delightful Goldbergian mechanism conveys them from their shelves to the survace via a series of conveyer belts and pulleys, to arrive in the hands of the bored teenagers populating the main desk. Or perhaps a race of Morlock-creatures drags them from their proper place and puts them on the conveyor belts, to be borne up to worlds they will never see.
Tags: bonnet, cap, cape, cardigan, edwardian, fascinator, hat, hood, jacket, Knitting, patterns, socks, victorian, vintage
