A Textbook of Model Millinery

By Ethel R. E. Langridge

This antique book contains a detailed guide to the designing and making of hats. This text was written for those who need a guide in technique when preparing for an examination, such as those of the City and Guilds of London Institute as well as for those interested in the trade as a whole. Covering most of the basic technique in an accessible and comprehensive fashion, this book is a great resource for beginners and students of the craft, and constitutes a great addition to any collection of millinery-based literature. Chapters contained herein include: Making a Hat; Equipment and Tools, Stitches, Sewing Cottons, and Wires; Esparterie Work, including Shape-Making; Materials, including the Grain of Material, Covering Materials, Draping Materials, Making Patterns, Sectional Works, Copying; Felt; Straw, including Braids, Pedal, Hoods; and many more. This text has been elected for modern republication due to its educational value and is proudly republished here with a new introduction to the subject.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kimball Press
• Release date: Mar 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781528763196

Book preview

CHAPTER I

MAKING A HAT

Millinery is far from being the simple occupation that many people imagine. In pre-war days, the apprenticeship in model millinery was at least three years. During the first year, the young apprentice made herself generally useful picking up pins, tidying the workroom and running errands. During this period she learned to make head-linings and put them in the finished hats.

In the next year, she became an improver graduating to more skilled work. She made and covered simple esparterie shapes and put on trimmings. In her third year she was a junior assistant. A keen and observant girl managed to learn a great deal these three years, both from what she was taught to do and by watching the others in the workroom.

There is no short cut to becoming an efficient milliner. Nowadays, schools and colleges provide vocational courses of a shorter duration than the old apprenticeship, but the syllabus is very full and the trained student must realise that she has still much to learn in the workroom.

It is impossible to describe briefly the process of making a hat, there are so many methods, each applicable to a particular shape or material, but the basic stages dealt with in this book are as follows:—

Firstly, the making of a good foundation;

Secondly, the choice of a suitable material;

Thirdly, the correct stitches to be used when making up and applicable to the material chosen;

Fourthly, the making of trimmings.

Never cover up mistakes with a trimming. No amount of camouflage can disguise a hat that has gone wrong—scrap it and start again.

A milliner needs patience; she can then enjoy the processes involved in creating a hat.

Hat making in the mass-productive industry is an entirely different procedure. Heavy machinery is used for the main processes; e.g. cutting and blocking and the hand work employed is usually in the final assembling of the parts, such as joining the crown and brim and the addition of head linings and trimmings.

Handmade model millinery is the work of an artist who sees the finished hat and methodically works through the necessary processes. In the hands of a skilled milliner the complete hat will never look handled.

Millinery, although allied to other needle-trades, is not one of them. It does not follow by any means that a good needlewoman will make a good milliner. Nevertheless it is an asset to be able to sew neatly and to use a machine expertly.

Many needle-trades work from a flat pattern, but although patterns are used in millinery, even a hat made from a pattern needs usually to be modelled on a modelling head or shaped in the hand and it is absolutely essential that the fingers and thumbs are trained to accustom themselves to the feel of a hat. By means of them, a milliner can judge the correctness of its form. Making a hat is something which must have vision. A milliner must know the possibilities and limitations of her tools and materials so that she will use the appropriate foundation for the creation she has in her mind’s eye.

The basic techniques described here will never become out of date. Though fashion may vary from year to year, old styles constantly reappear in new guise. Even hats made on wire shapes appear now and again, and it is certainly true that any type of shape used in millinery, if thoroughly mastered, can be applied to the demands of changing fashion.

Before we go on to details, here are some points to remember:

Millinery is definitely an art. It implies a relationship between the hand and the eye and, in the creative milliner, the imagination which reproduces something of the creator.

Creative ability results in good form, when the creator has a clear vision of the harmony of line, material and colour in the completed hat. This can be achieved only by a knowledge of the fundamental