100 Days: HabaDASHery!

Working quickly, I finished fabricating all the hatboxes, hatbox nest, and miniature hats for Halfland minor characters, Birds in Hats the other day (top). You see them propped up and stacked on a branch of the set's tree, shot from underneath, as in the film. The hats will be hung on little hooks around the area, along with a little hand mirror that the birds will fight over to see how they look in their new chapeaus.

The top two are what the Birds will be wearing. The top hat, upper left, was made from a plastic cap, scrap plastic disk, ringed with wire, to give it a rolled edge effect. (More detail below.)
The trick to this I think is in using stretch fabric, this was a scrap of gold lamé. The weave is a bit larger than I'd like for the scale, so if I made another, I'd use a stretch satin instead. (Take note Mark!) I covered the hollow plastic glue stick cap separately from the wire rimmed disk and then glued them together. Once all dry, it was an easy matter to cut through the disk, thus making it instead a brim. I found that using mini clothespins to hold the fabric in place as it dried left gathers that had to be cut away. (Use flat planks held with larger clamps instead, Mark)
I radically cut down the Peruvian knit cap hat prop too so it would match the proportion of my sketch better. I dyed it chartreuse as that seemed to emerge as a theme color in several of the mini hats. (The photo on the right is actually the back of the hat by mistake, the other side has a fine brown stripe like in the sketch.)

I'd been thinking about making all these hats and boxes for many many years. There will be one more hat finished, but it's weird to have most of them actually done now. Liberating?