Jingo Mastapone
Familiar Face
- Messages
- 50
- Location
- Oregon
Lads, I thought I'd show you some pictures of my latest fedora caper, which may be of some use to the more adventurous of you.
I got this gray Biltmore cheap. It was two sizes too small and had a dorky back bow:
One thing I've discovered in my past hat "manipulations" is that you can gain one full size by pulling the leather sweatband out and replacing it with grosgrain. And if, while you have the hat stripped down to bare felt, you soak it and wear it til dry over some kind of do-rag on your head, you can gain whatever size you need around the sweatband area with tolerance for the grosgrain sweatband. So I did both:
Since I wanted a hat to wear with a brown suit, I decided to re-ribbon it. Instead of using a piece of grosgrain from my stock, I decided to work with the original. I undid the back bow, which contains enough folds in it to stretch out to a conventional side bow, and dumped the whole thing into some RIT color remover. This brought it from black to a light khaki color. Then I dyed it with some RIT cocoa brown and rinsed it til it ran clear. Then a typical installation and voila:
A hat that fits great and goes with brown suits. Note that there is a slight amount of taper from the stretching process, visible in the side shot, but to me this is acceptable for an 18$ hat and when I get around to building a block, I can fix it without removing the sweatband because it is so thin. Also worth mentioning is the fact that going from a back bow to a side bow will expose some of the area on the side that was previously covered by straight ribbon and if there is any fading of the hat body, you will get a contrast as I did. Such is life.
I got this gray Biltmore cheap. It was two sizes too small and had a dorky back bow:
One thing I've discovered in my past hat "manipulations" is that you can gain one full size by pulling the leather sweatband out and replacing it with grosgrain. And if, while you have the hat stripped down to bare felt, you soak it and wear it til dry over some kind of do-rag on your head, you can gain whatever size you need around the sweatband area with tolerance for the grosgrain sweatband. So I did both:
Since I wanted a hat to wear with a brown suit, I decided to re-ribbon it. Instead of using a piece of grosgrain from my stock, I decided to work with the original. I undid the back bow, which contains enough folds in it to stretch out to a conventional side bow, and dumped the whole thing into some RIT color remover. This brought it from black to a light khaki color. Then I dyed it with some RIT cocoa brown and rinsed it til it ran clear. Then a typical installation and voila:
A hat that fits great and goes with brown suits. Note that there is a slight amount of taper from the stretching process, visible in the side shot, but to me this is acceptable for an 18$ hat and when I get around to building a block, I can fix it without removing the sweatband because it is so thin. Also worth mentioning is the fact that going from a back bow to a side bow will expose some of the area on the side that was previously covered by straight ribbon and if there is any fading of the hat body, you will get a contrast as I did. Such is life.
Last edited:
