My first made-from-scratch garment

My sewing skills are fairly rudimentary. I can replace a button, mend a torn seam, or darn a hole, but I've never considered myself up to making an entire garment from scratch. Even when it comes to alterations, I'm limited to small fixes that can be sewed by hand. (I do own a sewing machine, but I'm pretty much hopeless with it.)

But recently, I found myself in need of a garment I couldn't easily pick up at the store: a hat to go with Brian's Renaissance garb. It's been nearly eight years since we last went to a Ren Faire, but last year, as the weeks in pandemic isolation dragged into months, I found myself longing for that festival atmosphere. I mentioned this to a friend I play role-playing games with, and he expressed a similar hankering. Right then and there, we cooked up a plan to go to the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire as soon as conditions allowed — which turned out to be not until this fall. And eventually, we managed to get our entire RPG group on board.

So I started reassessing my garb and Brian's to see if we still had everything we needed. My outfit still fit, if a bit more snugly than it used to, but his was in need of some upgrades. His old pair of sweat pants had worn out, and he no longer had a pair that could pass muster as Renaissance breeches, so we had to find him a replacement, which turned out to be an adventure in itself. (It's all but impossible these days to find sweat pants in stores with the traditional gathered ankle, so we ended up having to order a pair online.) And the bedroom slippers he wore with his costume last time had proved unsuitable for serious walking, so we replaced those with a pair of slip-on leather shoes we'd picked up at a yard sale a few years back. (The tan shoes look a bit incongruous with his grey-and-black clothes, but I'm hoping to add a tan belt that will make the outfit a bit more coordinated.)

Looking this outfit over and comparing it with the costume guides on sites like RenFaire.com and FairsandFestivals.net, I realized there was still one key piece missing: a hat. A Renaissance gent can reasonably walk around in just a tunic and hose, but if he's outdoors with his head uncovered, he's going to look out of place.

Unfortunately, this wasn't a piece we were likely to be able to pick up in a thrift store. There are many hat styles appropriate to the Renaissance, from the Tudor flat cap to the tall hat associated with the Puritans, but there's not much overlap between them and the hats sold for men in the modern era. I did pop into the local thrift shop to see if by any chance they had a beret, which could potentially pass for a Renaissance muffin hat, but no such luck.

Still, I thought, at least some of these hat styles looked pretty simple, as hats go. Could it really be that hard to sew one from scratch? Could I find a pattern or a guide that would tell me how?

It turned out I could, eventually. The first few tutorials I found under "DIY Renaissance men's hat" made it seem really complicated. The Garbmonger's guide to making a Tudor flat cap had one whole page just explaining all the terms she was going to use, followed by four pages for the actual instructions — way more than I was going to be able to follow. A guide by Renaissance Tailor was a bit simpler, but it called for three layers of fabric, plus a layer of buckram (stiff lining) for the brim. That was more than I could scrounge up, and more than I was prepared to buy for a project that I might make a complete hash of. Especially when the cost of all those materials put together could come to more than a ready-made hat.

But eventually, I found a tutorial that looked like my speed — one that promised a "dead easy" method for constructing a "Kinda 15th Century Renaissance Hat." The material used in the pictures looked fairly substantial, so an old T-shirt wasn't going to serve the purpose, but I happened to have an old towel that I was planning to drop in the textile recycling bin because it had a stain on one end I couldn't get out. But there was still more than enough good material there to make the two pieces the tutorial called for: a band slightly longer than the circumference of the wearer's head, and a big circle with a diameter equal to three-quarters of that circumference measurement, or more if you want it "super floppy." (In my case, it ended up being just slightly more, since the only object I could find to trace around that was close to the right size was the brim of a witch hat I'd picked up for another costume.)

I didn't take any pictures during the assembly process, because it all went pretty much as outlined in the tutorial. The only part I had a bit of trouble with was Step 4, where you're supposed to "Put the two pieces of material together, so the correct sides of the material face inwards." Since the towel material was pretty much the same on both sides, it wasn't immediately apparent how this was supposed to work. But I eventually figured out that the bottom of the circle and the bottom of the band had to be lined up, back to back and edge to edge, and I managed to get the whole thing pinned into place (using large safety pins, since I didn't have any straight pins substantial enough to hold all those pleats of bulky fabric).

Sewing it up was a fairly laborious process, since I was working by hand and the fabric was quite thick. It took me several changes of thread to make it all the way around the hat and get the circle stitched to the band and the ends of the band stitched to each other. But the whole process didn't take more than an hour, and I felt certain it would have taken me at least that long just to set up the sewing machine and try to remember how to thread it, so I persevered.

And when I was done, lo and behold, I had a perfectly passable Renaissance muffin hat. Maybe the tufted terry cloth fabric isn't exactly period, but the shape is generally right (kind of like a shorter version of a chef's toque), and I doubt even the toughest period-apparel snob will raise an eyebrow at it. 

The entire project cost me nothing, since I used fabric I was just going to discard anyway. Brian's whole homemade outfit still clocks in at under twenty bucks: $1 for the thrift-shop shirt, $5 for the yard-sale shoes, and $13 (including shipping) for the new pair of sweat pants we had to order. And best of all, I now know that I can in fact make an entire garment — at least a small one — with my very own hands.

Which may come in handy, since if the Delta variant is still raging across Pennsylvania at the end of September, I'll probably need to figure out some way to make a face mask look period-appropriate, too (vaccine or no vaccine).