1840's Cap and Bonnet

Today's post is about my cap and bonnet I made and wore with my 1840's dress. I pulled both of these together in a couple days before I wore the dress for Halloween. The cap is completely hand sewn and I really love how it turned out! The bonnet was something that I thought of making about a week before the party, which was too late to order a base online so I went shopping at my local thrift stores to find a plain straw hat to modify. I ended up with one for a couple of dollars from Value Village and it turned out great!



The bonnet is made from a plain cotton fabric I had in my stash, trimmed with lace (also from my stash) and ties in the back with ribbon. I drafted the pattern using this tutorial and sewed it all in a couple of hours. Overall, I really like how this turned out, however I will probably make another one in the future and make the back piece just a little bit larger (I think my measurements were off just a bit).

As I said already about the bonnet, I started off with a plain, modern sun hat. I tranformed it by cutting off the brim then pinning it to the styrofoam head in the shape I wanted and trimmed any excess away. To save time, and my sanity, I used hot glue to re-attach the brim to the base and then covered it with ribbon (also hot glued on). I pulled out my ribbon stash and played around until I found a combination that I liked.

The ribbon ties were hand sewn onto the fabric piece that sits around the crown of the hat (part of the original hat) and then I hot glued a piece of bias tape over the section where the brim and crown piece met just to make it a little more tidy.

You can see here a small portion where I didn't end up covering.

When I started the bonnet I didn't have high hopes for it, but I was pleasantly surprised by the end result.