Hat makers usually need to utilize a wide variety of fabrics, tools, accessories, trimmings, and blocks in order to create a well-made hat. This wide assortment of millinery tools and supplies can be confusing for beginners and can become extremely costly. Thankfully, there are a number of materials that you already own within your house that can easily be used as substitute supplies that can be used to create beautiful and elegant hats for various individuals to purchase and wear.
Milliners are incredibly crafty and creative individuals, meaning that they can quickly figure out how to use inexpensive household items to create distinctive headwear. The millinery academy at Rebecca Share Millinery has composed a list of the most common household items that you can use to create incredibly unique and unusual hats and headpieces.
Wooden Bowls
Small wood sugar bowls and dip bowls are good alternatives to using button shaped hat blocks. Although the wood can sometimes be hard to pin into, it’s a great start to blocking a simple button hat design if you don’t have the correct hat block to get you going. You can even look for unusual wooden shaped platters and bigger bowls to block wide brims and unique hat shapes onto.
Aluminum Foil
Aluminum foil is helpful for milliners when they need to cover a hat block, especially when working with thermoplastics. Working with thermoplastic materials requires a great deal of heat, and utilizing aluminum foil will not melt under pressure and heat, unlike plastic wrap.
Plastic Wrap
One of the most necessary millinery supplies that you can easily find within your kitchen drawers is plastic wrap. Whenever you begin to block a hat, you can utilize the plastic wrap and spread it across your hat block, ultimately preventing any dyes from bleeding through or leaping onto other hats.
Clothespins and Clips
Another supply or tool that is useful for blocking is clothespins or clips, specifically ones used in a binder. These particular items can be beneficial when you need to hold certain materials in place while you sew them into other areas of your hat. Basically, these tools can provide you with an extra hand when you need to assemble certain fabrics or materials together, creating a seamless sense of unison within your hat.
Hair Spray
Now, you may be asking, “what could hair spray possibly have to do with millinery?”. Well, that’s a great question! Hair spray can act as a millinery stiffener. For example, if you are working with feathers and need them to stay in place after adding them to the exterior of your hat, quickly spraying them with some hair spray will hold these design pieces in place.
Various Kitchen Utensils
A number of different kitchen utensils can provide you with an ample amount of help within your millinery endeavors. Keeping a set of measuring spoons and even other utensils within your millinery studio can assist you in a number of different ways. When you begin to work with dyes and liquid materials while practicing hat-making, you will want to use the measuring spoons to measure out the right amount of colorant that you will need to paint your fabric a particular shade, permitting you to reproduce the same color results every time. The kitchen utensils can help with mixing purposes when utilizing color dyes for your hat-making purposes.