More Vintage Hats Omg

Seriously, someone take away my internet privileges. Yeah yeah, I need it for work, but I need parental controls put on my phone. My husband won't do it because he is just as bad. lol. But really, I came across some hella deals so I had no choice but to jump on them. I took a cue from my husband and started to look at hat lots. He always finds deals in lots, so I did some searching. I was looking on Etsy mainly but I find a lot of good single hats on there. Ebay is where the good lots live. I just received this lot of 2 pillbox hat frames and 11 bags of trimmings. 11 bags. These bags are filled with vintage flowers, decorative trims and some ribbons. Mainly flowers, but good lord these things are lovely.

                                  Before...

Aaaand after. Sorry about the weird layout... and the cat tail. This was after spritzing it with water and using a hair dryer to straighten them out. The bottom leaves are velvet and the top leaves are some super thin chiffon like material. I love the different textures.

Unfortunately this one did not benefit from a spritz and a blow out. These leaves are so thin and fraile that they pretty much looked the same after the revitalizing treatment. That just might be how they are supposed to look...?

                                      Before...

                                   And after!

                        Also after... Different side.

I have included some before and after pics because most of them were pretty squished and sad. I watched a few videos of folks restoring old flowers with a steamer or blow dryer so I decided to give those a go. I was worried with them being so old that they would not take the heat well, but as you can see they look a ton better. Some of them did not need any repairs, like these beauties:

Some of them had tags saying 'Made in Japan' or 'Made in Germany' so I am not sure how old they are, but they all look pretty damn old. The lady I bought them from said that she bought them years ago in an estate sale and never really did anything with them. Yeah, I asked. lol. I was just curious. There was also this cool ass thingy that I will most likely use for one of my 3 hat frames. Its kinda bitchin... 



Its the little V shaped dude in the middle. I did have to glue one of the little rhinestones back on but no biggie. I also got these 2 hat frames. The cream one is a little smaller but more defined, shape wise. Its like your classic pillbox hat, but not as big as like a Jackie O. The black one was more unstructured and has a bit of a height in the middle. I thought about covering that one in flowers and covering the flowers with a veil. Not one that goes over my face, but one that just covers the hat. I don't like the veil over glasses look much, so I will most likely be tucking that up under the hats that come with them. Here are the blanks:

And some more of the goodies that came with this lot...

A little bit of trim...

                                                                        And some fruit...

                                                                    

                                                        These are pretty shiny black leaves

                                                     Some more leaves, in blues and yellow

                                More trims. These are pretty long and some of them are kind of thick. 

I was playing around with designs and posting pictures on Instagram when a milliner I follow contacted me about sending some veils since I mentioned wanting to get one. She wanted to send them to me for free, but I wanted to pay her for something. She said I could pay it forward and asked me if there was anything else I needed, like flowers. I said sure because she has made hats and knows a thing or two about trimmings and whatnot. What she sent was a whole box full of amazingness! More on that in the next post. But I do believe that I am pretty stocked up. Now I have some hat work to do.  :-D