Fixing an Old Hat

So, around Christmastime, I visited an antique shop and bought this little hat for about 19 bucks.

I thought it would be really cute if only someone like me could come along and buy it and fix it up. It would look nice with some 50's outfit, or something. It kind of reminded me of one of the hats that Lucy would wear on I Love Lucy (which is one of my favorite shows):

So anyways, I bought it, and then I scrounged around for some better looking flowers. I found quite a few from various craft stores such as Hobby Lobby and Michael's. The hat was also rather dirty.

I hated to say goodbye to the original flowers even so, because I know they had been through a lot. I mean, they had been worn on someone's head and you could just see how old they were.

Here's a picture of the hat before being fixed up... Oh look! It's a picture of my FACE! :D

Aren't I so beautiful?!

Also, when I took the flowers off, I noticed the remnants of what was once something like a veil. I didn't really want to bother putting a new veil on because I kind of liked it the way it was.
After removing the flowers, I got some dish soap and some water and gently scrubbed the dirty parts with a soft-bristle toothbrush. It looked much cleaner afterwards.

Then I began to get my flowers ready. It took me awhile to figure out what to do to keep them on the hat, but I found this really thin wire at Michael's (30 gauge), which was easy enough to work with the flowers.
So thus the stringing and twisting began. It was a rather tedious process, wrapping the wire around the flowers without crushing them or causing them to fray. But I managed to get them all wired with a tail, one at at a time.

I had two different flowers. For the smaller ones, I had to wrap the wire around the stem very close to the flower, then twist it like a twist-tie.

For the larger flower, I took a pin and stuck it through the stem, so that I could just thread the wire through, and then twist.

 

Once I had all my flowers wired, I laid them all out in order so that I could see that I had enough.

Then comes the fun part. Twisting them all together very carefully to make a flower-chain. Just like the fairies wear. :)

I had to be very gentle with the flowers at this point to avoid crushing or fraying them.

I apologize if the lighting is a bit weird/different in some of the pictures. It took me a couple days to do this, and some of those days were rainy. :P

 This was a slow job, and a tedious, one, but it was also kind of relaxing to just sit there and twist. Anyways, I figured the best way to adhere the flowers to the actual hat would be to sew it on with simple stitches over and under the wire and into the hat. The original hat had tiny little staples, but I don't have any staples that small, and I didn't want to do that in case I had to take it out for some reason.

I used thick thread because I didn't want to take the chance of it breaking. :P

All finished! I think it turned out super cute. :) I really like the flowers. The hat definitely makes more of a statement now.

Now all I gotta do is figure out a hairstyle to go with it. :)

So there it is! I kind of put this project off for awhile before actually doing it. You know how you have this task/project to do, but you want to do a good job so you just keep putting it off because you're scared you might ruin it? I kind of did that with this hat. :) Fortunately, it turned out pretty cute.

Next, I'm going to think of what I can do with this hat that a couple of good friends gave me. Or maybe I could just leave it like it is. *shrug*

Well, have a good day, peoples!
-Phoebe